Accurate indoor condition control based on PMV prediction in BEMS environments

Recently, there has been high demand for an efficient energy management system that decreases total energy consumption. The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011 resulted in the shutdown of nuclear power plants in Japan, thus limiting the supply of power. Since then, the need for an energy management system has become more pronounced in Japan. Such a situation warrants efficient energy consumption through the use of an energy management system. When heating, ventilation, and air conditioning are restricted, especially under peak-cut or peak-leveling control of electric power consumption, it should be ensured that the living environment is not uncomfortable for humans. However, in the existing methods, living environment comfort has not been considered practically in terms of the fundamental parameters, namely, volume, window size, and number of people in a given room, despite the considerable influence of these parameters on room amenity. In this study, we proposed a new control method that considers these parameters for maintaining the amenity index in indoor environments at a set value by predicting the predicted mean vote value. Furthermore, we set up a building energy management system in an office building in Kanagawa, Japan, to compare the proposed control method with an existing one. Two different cases were considered in this experiment: control using an existing method and control using the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method maintains the amenity index of the room at the desired level, while reducing peak and total power consumption levels.