| Abstract: |
Increasing user comfort and reducing operation costs have
always been two primary objectives of building operations
and control strategies. Current building control strategies
are unable to incorporate occupant level comfort and meet
the operation goals simultaneously. In this paper, we present
a novel utility based building control strategy that optimizes
the tradeoff in meeting the user comfort and reduction in
operation cost by reducing energy usage. We present an
implementation of the proposed control strategy as an intelligent
lighting control strategy that significantly reduces
energy cost. Our approach is based on a principled, decision
theoretic formulation of the control task. We demonstrate
the use of mobile wireless sensor networks to optimize the
trade-off between fulfilling different occupants' light preferences
and minimizing energy consumption. We further extend
our approach to optimally exploit external light sources
for additional energy savings, a process called daylight harvesting.
Also we demonstrate that, an active sensing approach
maximizes the mobile sensor network's lifetime by
sensing only during most informative situations. We provide
efficient algorithms for solving the underlying complex
optimization problems and we extensively evaluate our proposed
approach in a proof-of-concept testbed using MICA2
motes and dimmable lamps. Our experimental results indicate
a significant improvement in user utility, and reduced
energy cost.
|