Improving the Ambient Temperature Control Performance in Smart Homes and Buildings

Currently, it is becoming increasingly common to find numerous electronic devices installed in office and residential spaces as part of building automation solutions. These devices provide a rich set of data related to the inside and outside environment, such as indoor and outdoor temperature, humidity, and solar radiation. However, commercial of-the-shelf climatic control systems continue to rely on simple controllers like proportional-integral-derivative or even on-off, which do not take into account such variables. This work evaluates the potential performance gains of adopting more advanced controllers, in this case based on pole-placement, enhanced with additional variables, namely solar radiation and external temperature, obtained with dedicated low-cost sensors. This approach is evaluated both in simulated and real-world environments. The obtained results show that pole-placement controllers clearly outperform on-off controllers and that the use of the additional variables in pole-placement controllers allows relevant performance gains in key parameters such as error signal MSE (17%) and control signal variance (40%), when compared with simple PP controllers. The observed energy consumption savings obtained by using the additional variables are marginal (≈1%, but the reduction of the error signal MSE and control signal variance have a significant impact on energy consumption peaks and on equipment lifetime, thus largely compensating the increase in the system complexity.