Human-in-the-loop Sensing and Control for Commercial Building Energy Efficiency and Occupant Comfort
- Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States)
- Bosch Research and Technology Center, Pittsburgh, PA (United States)
Most of the existing heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in commercial buildings operate in a conservative manner by assuming maximum occupancy in each room during pre-specified periods of the week, leading to significant energy being wasted as rooms are over-conditioned compared to the actual requirements of the occupants. Though critical, our understanding of occupancy patterns and thermal comfort needs of the occupants in commercial buildings is lacking and it is well known that both of these quantities are stochastic and time-varying, thus requiring sensing solutions to estimate them. This project had the goal of designing, implementing and evaluating a hardware and software solution to ameliorate this challenge. In particular, a depth camera (one whose pixels reveal distance from the camera as opposed to color values) placed on doorways is used to detect entrance and exit events from thermal zones in the building, and thereby estimate their occupancy levels. This information is then fed to a novel control algorithm that can, through interactions with the HVAC system, learn how to provide control inputs that maximize comfort and minimize energy waste. The resulting system represents a significant improvement over existing controllers for commercial HVAC systems and allowed us to improve our understanding of the design of future human-in-the-loop control solutions. For this solution to be feasible, the project had target metrics for its performance and cost. In particular, entrance and exit events for occupants moving about the building would need to be detected with an accuracy higher than 97%; and the resulting control inputs derived from this information would need to lead to approximately 10% energy savings compared to a schedule-based controller. Furthermore, regarding the final hardware design, the project had a target bill of materials (BOM) cost for the sensing solution of less than US$200 per unit while using less than 25W of power on average. All of these target metrics were met or exceeded by our final proposed solution. We performed evaluations by deploying the system in over 20 rooms of different types across 6 commercial buildings in Pittsburgh, PA over the course of three years, and performing targeted controlled experiments to test its performance along the different metrics. The human-in-the-loop control solutions (both hardware and software) developed through this project are expected to lead to significant improvements in the comfort and energy efficiency of HVAC systems used in commercial buildings. The insights we developed through the project pave the way to HVAC systems that can condition interior spaces according to their real-time utilization and the thermal comfort needs of the occupants, thereby reducing energy use. They also open up a new learning-based way of configuring HVAC controllers without having to manually fine-tune them for each building. These innovations can significantly increase the adoption of novel control solutions by the industry and thereby save resources and reduce costs of operation.
- Research Organization:
- Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Energy Efficiency Office. Building Technologies Office
- Contributing Organization:
- Stony Brook University
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0007682; FOA-0001383
- OSTI ID:
- 1963259
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-CMU-0007682
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Long term occupancy estimation in a commercial space: an empirical study: poster abstract
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conference | January 2017 |
ODDS: Real-Time Object Detection Using Depth Sensors on Embedded GPUs
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conference | April 2018 |
Gnu-RL: A Precocial Reinforcement Learning Solution for Building HVAC Control Using a Differentiable MPC Policy
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conference | November 2019 |
Cohort
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conference | November 2020 |
OccuTherm: Occupant Thermal Comfort Inference using Body Shape Information
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conference | January 2019 |
Gnu-RL: A Practical and Scalable Reinforcement Learning Solution for Building HVAC Control Using a Differentiable MPC Policy
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journal | November 2020 |
Leveraging Fine-Grained Occupancy Estimation Patterns for Effective HVAC Control
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conference | April 2020 |
Learning a Distributed Control Scheme for Demand Flexibility in Thermostatically Controlled Loads
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conference | November 2020 |
Cod
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conference | November 2017 |
Data-driven Thermal Model Inference with ARMAX, in Smart Environments, based on Normalized Mutual Information
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conference | June 2018 |
FORK: fine grained occupancy estimatoR using kinect on ARM embedded platforms
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conference | November 2017 |
Towards Off-policy Evaluation as a Prerequisite for Real-world Reinforcement Learning in Building Control
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conference | November 2020 |
Dataset
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conference | November 2019 |
Real-Time Fine Grained Occupancy Estimation Using Depth Sensors on ARM Embedded Platforms
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conference | April 2017 |
Dataset
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conference | November 2019 |
Data-Driven Operation of Building Systems: Present Challenges and Future Prospects
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book | May 2018 |
Towards Class-Balancing Human Comfort Datasets with GANs
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conference | November 2019 |
Application-driven Privacy-preserving Data Publishing with Correlated Attributes | preprint | January 2018 |
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