An Ontology-Based Thermal Comfort Management System In Smart Buildings

Achieving thermal comfort for occupants in buildings has been the main focus of several studies in recent years. The challenging issue of the building envelope is to save energy and achieve a high comfortable environment simultaneously. To calculate the thermal comfort level in a living space, environmental factors such as indoor air temperature, mean radiant temperature, air velocity, and humidity are needed. The latter parameters are aggregated through the well known PMV index. In this paper, we introduce a wireless sensor network (WSN)-based comfort measurement approach, called ONCOM, using a dedicated ontology and the emotional state analysis of the occupant to reach the "adequate" indoor thermal comfort. The main thrust of ONCOM stands on the smooth connection of human emotions with the thermal sensations. Carried out experiments showed that emotions, unveiled from tweets, have been efficiently used to mitigate user thermal discomfort.