The human behavior : a tracking system to follow the human occupancy

Various control strategies have been adopted to improve energy efficiency in commercial office buildings, particularly the alignment of energy consumption for space conditioning and lighting patterns with human occupancy. Considerable uncertainty however exists in these patterns but advancement in information and communication technology (ICT) has made it possible to reduce these uncertainties. More fine-grained building occupants information can now be gotten in real-time for dynamic demand-driven space lighting and conditioning controls. In this paper the performance of one of such technologies; radio frequency identification (RFID) system is accessed in the determination of human occupancy and location from experiments carried out in a typical office building in the Netherlands. The correlation between energy use by office appliance and human occupancy was also investigated. Furthermore, steps that could be taken to improve energy consumption for comfort through a demand-driven process control strategy are identified

Detecting and tracing building occupants to optimize process control

Occupant behaviour has been shown to have a large impact on the energy consumed in buildings than other thermal related process. For worthwhile energy savings, it is therefore crucial that occupant behaviour be included in the process control of building systems. For this set of control objective with the user central in the control of building systems, it is most important to detect the individual user on a specific workplace within a time span of minutes because the inertia of the building systems is in this order of his magnitude. The indoor occupancy detection system should be able to detect every individual in a spatial area and to be able to track and trace the person. Therefore an indoor occupancy detection and positioning system is being designed which, can communicate with a Building Energy Management System (BMS). The results of a first experiment are described in this paper.<br/

Towards building occupants positioning : track and trace for optimal process control

Abstract in teks

Occupants'behavioural impact on energy consumption: 'human-in-the-loop'comfort process control

Optimizing comfort for occupants and its related energy use is becoming more important. Presently, however, heating ventilation air-conditioning (HVAC) system installations often do not work in practice effectively and efficiently as the behaviour of the occupants is not included. The results are comfort complaints as well as unnecessary high-energy consumption. As the end-user influence becomes even more important within the energy process of sustainable buildings, it is necessary to integrate the occupants in the buildings' performance control loop. Laboratory experiments were performed to look for a correlation between infrared (IR) sensor temperature registrations and individual perceived thermal comfort in an individually conditioned workplace. It proved that it is in principle possible to use the third finger skin temperature as a control parameter for perceived thermal comfort. In another experiment in a real in-use office building, a wireless sensor network was applied to describe user behaviour on room and floor level. The results showed that it is possible to capture individual user behaviour and to use this to further optimize comfort in relation to energy consumption. Based on our experiments, we could determine the influence of occupants' behaviour on energy use and determine possible energy reduction by implementing the human-in-the-loop process control strategy