Fault Injection Framework for Demand-Controlled Ventilation and Heating Systems Based on Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

Abstract

The demand-controlled ventilation as an advanced control approach is one of the recent developments in smart building technologies. The aim is the optimization of energy consumption, occupant comfort and air quality based on cost-effective, flexible, scalable, and low-power wireless sensor and actuator networks that facilitate monitoring and control of the building automation system. However, the device nodes and communication routes are error-prone due to various types of faults. When a fault arises in the network or in the nodes, the sensor nodes may produce erroneous data and the actuator nodes' behavior can differ from their expected action on the physical plant. Therefore, this study successfully explicates a novel fault injection framework as a tool that scholars can simply monitor the behavior of this system in the occurrence of different types of faults which are artificially injected or add their own desired type of fault to this framework. Then, authors indicate the fault-error-failure propagation model in component level and system level. The final aim of authors is to use this framework for their future research of testing fault detection and diagnosis methods. This demand-controlled ventilation and heating system is created based on wireless sensor and actuator networks which is more compatible with reality as the wireless communication is very prevalent nowadays and this wireless model is validated by the previous cabled model. The literature research by the authors indicates the excellence of the ZigBee protocol for building automation. In the result section, some samples from the behavior of the system in healthy-mode and faulty-mode in the format of temperature signals as the controlled variable and the comparison of energy consumption of heating system in healthy mode and different faulty modes are shown.