DESIGN AND TUNING OF A FUZZY CONTROLLER FOR INDOOR AIR QUALITY AND THERMAL COMFORT MANAGEMENT

Abstract

This paper presents the development and testing of a multi objective fuzzy controller. It is dedicated to the control of thermal comfort and indoor air quality while minimising energy consumption and reducing instabilities are other constraints for this controller. After a brief introduction on the difficult task of indoor climate control, the test cell and its corresponding model is described in the second section. The model has been developed within TRNSYS. Section 3 describes the architecture of the fuzzy controller applied to these control objectives in the test cell. A hierarchical architecture has finally been selected since it is a very flexible architecture and it results in reducing the total number of fuzzy rules. The rule optimisation technique, based on genetic algorithms is also presented in the third section. Simulation results are finally presented. They prove that, after optimisation, the fuzzy controller greatly outperforms a typical ON-OFF controller on all control criteria. Energy consumption is in particular reduced by more than 10%. The fourth section of this chapter presents field experiments among 20 subjects of both ON-OFF control and fuzzy control. If major differences are not observed on the thermal comfort and indoor air quality point of view, these experiments however illustrate the importance of on-line tuning of specific fuzzy rules.