Humans-in-the-Building: Getting Rid of Thermostats in Comfort-Based Energy Management Control Systems

The Energy Management Control Systems present in today's Building Automation Systems (BASs) typically adopt thermostats, potentially integrated with humidity, CO2, and occupancy sensors, to regulate internal temperature within a predefined range to optimize energy consumption. However direct feedback of occupants' personal comfort is rarely considered. Differently, this letter proposes a new thermal control paradigm, referred to as "humans-in-the-buildings", where individuals can directly signal their discomfort to the energy management system which thus adjusts the HVAC control inputs accordingly. We provide a mathematical formulation for this novel comfort-based control and demonstrate that neither temperature sensors nor knowledge of the occupants' discomfort profiles is required, as each room's temperature is regulated based solely on the real-time discomfort signals from individuals. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed comfort-based control is substantiated through simulations conducted on multiple adjacent rooms established building dynamics modeling.