A Review of Intelligent Control Approaches in Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning Systems

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are known to be the key energy consumption appliances in buildings. Today, because of the great request for HVAC installations in buildings, the design of efficient controllers is a significant problem for system designers to reduce the consuming of energy of HVAC systems while meeting the thermal comfort requirements of buildings. Large efforts have been done to address designing powerful and effective controllers for various HVAC systems. Large efforts have been done to address designing powerful and effective controllers for various HVAC systems. This paper focuses on reviewing techniques and approaches used in designing HVAC controllers with their main strength and weak points. Various control approaches were presented including, but not limited to, proportional-integral-derivative, optimal, nonlinear, adaptive, robust, and artificial intelligent controllers. Special attention was given for presenting the intelligent control approaches, as well as fuzzy logic, neural networks, fusion or hybrid difficult-and soft-control techniques, and genetic algorithms.