Improving Thermal Comfort in Residential Buildings Using Artificial Immune System

With the fast development of information technology and increasingly prominent environmental problem, building comfort and energy management become the major tasks for an intelligent residential building system. According to statistical studies, people spend 80% of their lives in buildings. Hence it is not surprising that they constantly seek to improve comfort in their living spaces. This paper presents an intelligent control system based on artificial immune system architecture to maintain the thermal comfort while reducing energy consumption. Specifically, a residential building is regarded as a human body and a comfortable thermal environment means the healthy state of body. Whenever outside factors disturb this state, which is analogous to the intrusion of pathogens, the immune system will work automatically to eliminate them and therefore to keep the proper state of the body. The experimental results show the advantages of our system comparing with two widely used baseline approaches: two-position control and PI control.