A smart learning based control system for reducing energy wastage

Abstract

This paper presents a smart appliance control system aimed at reducing electricity wastage and achieving energy savings. Air conditioners consume about 40% energy in residential and commercial sectors. Adding to this wastage are human errors such as frequently changing cooling temperature, letting the AC run in user absence, lack of awareness about the surroundings such as leaving windows opened and turning lights and ACs ON etc., to name a few. There is an urgent need for a smart control system that can sense these factors and mitigate the energy waste. To this end, we design and develop a smart control system that can learn the ambient environment including the light and temperature levels, user presence, and user count before turning lights and ACs ON. Our proposed system also learns user preferences and sets the cooling temperature to a user comfort level rather than a preset value which may not satisfy the inhabitants of the room. We implemented the decision making algorithm and deployed the controlling unit in conference room for over a week. The system resulted in energy savings of 5%, obtained a 8.5 rating over 10 for user satisfactory levels and the entire unit responds in two mins.