Discrete-event diagnostics of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems

We consider a typical commercial building heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system with its primary equipment that conditions the medium of energy transport (water) and air handling system (AHS) that conditions the air supplied to the occupied space whose temperature is maintained. The components, such as valves, dampers, controllers, pumps, boilers, etc., are modeled for their normal and failure mode operations in the framework of discrete event systems. The DIAGNOSER diagnostic methodology of Sampath et al. (1995, 1996) is applied to describe their combined behavior. The diagnosers are built and used to analyze the diagnosibility of failures for different sets of available sensors