The development of adaptive control techniques for BEMS

An on-line self-tuning strategy for the temperature control of a building energy management system (BEMS) test-cell is presented and is compared with the traditional technique used in building services systems control. The superiority of the advanced techniques is demonstrated, and full-scale testing of the technique is now warranted to more accurately assess its true potential. The test-cell research provides the main ingredients of full scale thermal systems behaviour, and serves as a good starting point for testing the techniques on full scale buildings. However, such practical implementations require good quality models describing the thermal behaviour of buildings for subsequent on-line use. The authors are currently engaged in this full-scale modelling work. Such models need to be developed for a variety of buildings in order that a range of model orders, dead-times and dynamic responses are available for recursive implementation and use in controller design, as discussed for the test-cell case