The role of control technology for energy savings in buildings

An online self-tuning strategy for the temperature control of a test-cell is presented and is compared with the traditional PID technique used in building services systems control. The superiority of the advanced technique is demonstrated, and a full-scale testing of the technique is now warranted to more accurately assess its true potential. However, such practical implementations require good quality models describing the thermal behaviour of buildings for subsequent online use. Such models should 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 here for the test-cell case. Knowledge of this type is necessary for a range of building types in order to assess those buildings which can benefit most from the new control techniques