Collaborative Building Control to Optimize Energy Saving and Improve Occupants' Experience

For commercial buildings, energy related control policies, such as HVAC or lighting schedule and set points, are typically defined and imposed by facility managers. Occupants, who are the end users of the building, generally have no opportunity to contribute the definition of control policies or have limited methods to communicate with facility managers or other occupants for their specific needs or preferences. This one way, top-down process of policy definition often results two consequences. On the one hand, facility managers who have stringent energy policies to achieve energy saving goals often need to sacrifice occupants' comfort; on the other hand, those who relax the energy policies to avoid occupant complains often miss the opportunity for energy saving. We present a collaborative control system named CECC, which stands for Collaborative Energy and Comfort Control, to enable a collaborative setting definition paradigm: occupants and facilities managers submit requirements and rules to CECC, respectively. Equipped with a rule engine, CECC verifies if occupants' requirements comply with rules from facility managers. It also detects conflictive requirements from occupants and guides occupants to solve conflicts with rules defined by facility managers. The output from CECC is a set of optimized and consistent settings for Building Automation Systems (BASs) to execute. Through assistant of CECC, occupants and facility managers jointly aggregate information from a large society. Comparing to the traditional single person setpoint development, the proposed closed-loop collaborative building control paradigm has better chances to achieve significant energy saving without compromising comfort.