Research for IT Driven Energy Efficiency Based on a Multidimensional Comfort Control^*

Abstract

The incessant need for energy has raised its cost to unexpected heights. In response to this situation, many projects have been started in order to save energy. In this context, the RIDER project tries to identify pathways for providing recommendations to decrease those costs. The main goal of this project is to develop a weak system dependency of energy management framework which could be applied to different systems and various scales. Particularly, our work focuses on proposing generic optimization techniques for energy management systems. Therefore, our supervision system has to follow RIDER requirements and consider the weak system dependency as well as genericity (i.e., a multi-scale applicable solution). In order to improve the thermal comfort level and/or reduce energy costs, RIDER supervision rules allow the computation of the most relevant setpoints to be provided to the energy control system. Since thermal comfort is a subjective multidimensional concept, an interpretable model is introduced. For this, Multi Attribute Utility Theory is introduced in order to make the multidimensional comfort control problem tractable. In fact, the aggregate objective thermal comfort function proposed by literatures; makes control not intuitive. Thus, interpretable and easily tractable control rules must be designed. The control of thermal comfort is directly based on comfort performance and not on the behavioral model of the supervised building. It guarantees as well its weak system dependency as its multi-scale applicability. This model is embedded in a decision support system that supervises the building energy system control.