Occupancy pattern based intelligent control for improving energy efficiency in buildings

Energy efficiency and occupant comfort are two major issues in building control system design, and the major challenge lies in the development of an effective control strategy for minimizing the total energy usage without compromising the indoor comfort. In this paper, a multi-agent control system for building applications is proposed. Besides the environmental factors including the outside CO₂ concentration, external daylight and ambient temperature, the occupancy pattern of the building is also taken into account in the control strategy development. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is utilized to enable the multi-agent control system to achieve the high energy efficiency and high level of comfort. In addition, plug loads are managed by the proposed control system for further improving the building energy efficiency. Case studies and corresponding simulation results are presented and analyzed in this paper.