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Hybrid smart lighting and climate control system for buildings

Conference Paper · December 2014

DOI: 10.1049/ic.2014.0047

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 Hybrid smart lighting and climate control system for buildings
J Higuera, W Hertog, M Perálvarez, J Carreras
Catalonia Institute of Energy Research (IREC), Barcelona Spain, jehiguera@irec.cat
Keywords: smart lighting, Wirelesses Sensor Network
(WSN), LED lighting system, Predicted mean vote (PMV).
Abstract
This paper deals with a new Smart lighting and climate
system for sustainable office buildings. The system contains
intelligent light engines able to detect natural lighting levels
and to dim artificial lighting levels to increase the visual
comfort and reduce the energy consumption. The heating,
ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) subsystem is based
on a smart thermostat. This module, adjusts environmental
comfort indicators to increase thermal user comfort. In
addition, the overall system is organized as a Wireless Sensor
and actuator Network (WSAN). Different sensors nodes to
monitor occupancy patterns, operative temperate, air velocity,
CO2, relative humidity and illuminance levels were developed
according energy harvesting techniques. The control system
allows reducing the overall energy consumption near to 23%
in lighting and 43% in HVAC and it is oriented to sustainable
office buildings.
1 Introduction
Building sector represents 35% of total final energy
consumption in the world [1]. A detailed analysis reveals that
buildings consumption is distributed in the following manner:
the 60% is due to heating, cooling and domestic hot water
while the remaining 40 % corresponds to lighting, computers
and electronics energy consumption.
This sector is currently embedded in an era of change due the
adoption of solid state LED lighting technologies [2] that
have the potential to reduce the energy consumption beyond
50% in 2050 compared to current levels. According this
perspective, the trends indicate a rise of smart control systems
combining energy efficient HVAC and lighting as in [3] and
[4]. These systems are holistic and comprehensive solutions
that can generate additional direct energy savings of up to 20-
30% in the electricity bill.
Taking this tendency under consideration, in this work was
designed an innovative smart control system to increase the
visual comfort and thermal comfort. The control system
contains smart luminaires to detect occupancy and
illuminance levels allowing modifying artificial lighting
levels according visual comfort indicators and reducing the
overall energy consumption.
1
The HVAC sub-system is based on active beams and it is
controlled by a single smart thermostat that measure air
temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide and air
velocity.
The smart thermostat was designed to be installed in an office
building dispatch. The thermostat, calculates in real time
operative temperature and environmental two thermal user
comfort indicators. These are Predicted Mean Vote (PMV)
and Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied (PPD) defined in
standard ISO 7730. In addition, the overall system is
organized as a Wireless Sensor and actuator Network
(WSAN) containing intelligent and autonomous sensor
devices. These nodes allow monitoring occupancy patterns;
air temperature, air velocity, CO2 levels, relative humidity
and illuminance levels. Also, all of them were developed
according energy harvesting techniques.
Different intelligent algorithms for human centric lighting
studies and thermal comfort analysis were developed. These
algorithms are based on artificial intelligence techniques. For
lighting was designed a predictive algorithm that is based on
Fuzzy logic techniques. A second one is neural network
algorithm oriented to determine experimentally thermal
comfort indicators. Both of them are oriented to running in
real time virtual control system implemented in Matlab and
embedded ultralow power devices.
The information related to lighting and the HVAC subsystem
is merged in a Matlab application. All information is
exported toward a web server of type Representational State
Transfer (REST). This web server is a free platform that
contains an open API intended to control intelligent devices
for the Internet of Things (IoT).
The paper is organized as follows. The hardware architecture
of the luminaires architecture and autonomous sensor nodes
are presented in section two. Next, in section three is
explained the HVAC system and smart thermostat operation.
In section four, are explained the algorithms intended to
lighting control and thermal comfort studies. The REST web
service architecture and experimental results in the
framework of the Internet of Things (IoT) are presented in
section five. Finally In section six, considerations on the
effective energy savings which can be achieved through the
proposed solution are presented.
2 Smart lighting system architecture
Smart Lighting is related to the second wave of lighting
technologies that pivot on heterogeneous devices: fluorescent
luminaires, solid state LED and OLED devices with the
possibility of integrating a wide set of capabilities. The most
important features are related to enabling intelligent functions
Figure 2: Autonomous illuminance and temperature nodes
such as autonomous spectral tunability and adaptive dimming
according energy efficient goals oriented to the real needs of
The autonomous temperature nodes are located near the
the illuminated space and taking into account the natural
windows, desk, and on the walls at different heights to
lighting available.
analyze the fluctuations of the temperature gradients in
different parts of the office during 24 hours in a day. The
The luminaires platform is shown in Figure 1 and it is based
stored information is employed to train different algorithms
on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) digital sensors.
based on artificial intelligence techniques.

3 HVAC control system

Figure 1: Smart luminaires hardware architecture
The architecture utilizes two adjustable driver types: pulse
Width Modulation (PWM) and analogue actuator interface (1-
10V) to be compatible with DALI systems. This research
sensor platform incorporates ultra low power occupancy and
illuminance digital sensors and additional spare channels to
incorporate a digital colour sensor or a mini-spectrometer.
Furthermore, dimming and energy regulation is controlled by
the CPU based on an MSP430 microcontroller. Also, the
hardware architecture has a wireless communications
interface to interact with different autonomous sensors and
actuators located in the office dispatch.
With the aim to compare the operation of a traditional HVAC,
system and identify areas for improvement in the climate
system, was designed an innovative smart thermostat. An
intensive campaign of measurement allows studying the
relations between the climate comfort probabilities and the
real user perception.
For the experiments a chilled beam system was employed.
This system is characterized by getting cold water and hot
water to be conditioned and optimize the thermal user
comfort. In this type of systems the primary air hits the
ventilation and the water provides the heat load.
In this study each chilled beam has four pipes, so that heating
water and cooling water can be supplied simultaneously to the
building, as required by zone.
In first instance a smart thermostat prototype was designed to
control the climate system. The main hardware has three basic
modules: control module, sensor module and module
communications. The control module contains a MSP430
microcontroller that runs the climate algorithm in the real-
time operating system TinyOS. Control rules including
temperature set points and dead zone definition was
programmed in the firmware. Figure 3 shows the thermostat
hardware architecture.

Different autonomous sensors are illuminance, temperature

and relative humidity nodes. All of them contain a
photovoltaic harvester based on organic solar cells for indoor
operation and a direct current (DC/DC) regulator with a
Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) charge controller
and a supercapacitor. Illuminance nodes perform real-time
measurement of natural illuminance between (0-100.000 lx)
near the windows to determine natural and artificial
illuminance values in the work plane. Figure 2 show the
Figure 3: Smart thermostat architecture
different autonomous sensors located around the walls in the
office.
The sensing and actuator module contain channels for
measuring carbon dioxide, indoor temperature, air velocity,
In addition, this information is sent wirelessly toward the
relative humidity. In addition this system allows controlling
luminaires and the coordinator node in the lighting network.
two on/off solenoid valves. With the communication module

2
the thermostat sends messages toward the application control
system running in Matlab. This application calculates
environmental comfort index such as PMV and PPD. The
Figure 4 shows the model that is running in the smart
thermostat. The finite state machine in the CPU defines two
basic operational modes: a first state related to message
transmission and a second one for deep sleep operation where
the thermostat is in low-power mode and the RF transceiver is
disabled to save energy.

Figure 5. Fuzzy logic algorithm

The rules must be combined in some manner in order to make
a decision. The algorithm uses inference rules using boolean
logic and aggregation methods of type (IF-OR-NOT-AND)
for quantifying the input variables. The output values must
be defuzzified in order to resolve a single output value from
the input dataset. The final desired output is the expected
artificial illuminance, visual comfort index and power
consumption.

4.2 Neural network algorithm

Figure 4. Climate control system model
A model to determine the operative temperature has been
A neural network is trained to estimate the operative elaborated through a computational neural network algorithm.
temperature which takes into consideration the indoor The model is function of indoor air temperature (T_air_in),
temperature, the outdoor air temperature, and the energy outdoor air temperature (T_air_out), indoor relative humidity
consumption in 24 hours. The estimation of metabolism uses (RH_in) and output relative humidity (RH_out) as show the
the ISO 7730-2005 standard [5]. This value depends on equation (1).
clothing, relative humidity and air velocity estimation. Also,
the air quality index prediction will be employed as an input Top: Func[T_air_in + T_air_out+ RH_in +RH_out] (1)
of any Variable Air Volume (VAV) control sub-system to
control the levels of CO2 in the office. The average operating temperature has been estimated by
using the training method of Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm
4 Human centric lighting and thermal comfort [7]. With the estimation of the operative temperature,
additional parameters are used to calculate the PMV and PPD
algorithms index. The PMV index reflects the opinion of a large group of
4.1 Fuzzy logic algorithm people on their thermal sensation assessed from a scale with
seven levels as shown in Table 1.
With aim to compare different lighting control strategies
increase the visual comfort and determine the amount of Scale Thermal sensation
lighting that is available in the work plane was designed a +3 very hot
fuzzy logic algorithm. As shown in Figure 5.
+2 hot
This model attempt to adjust the lighting levels by +1 slightly hot
synthesizing a set of linguistic control rules obtained from thermal neutrality
experienced human operators. The computational algorithm 0
adjusts lighting comfort levels complaining the standard UNE -1 cool slightly
12464-2012 [6]. The input variables in the model are -2 cool
occupancy user detection, daylighting levels in the work
plane, the position of the blinds, the schedule of work in the -3 cold
office and the daylighting indexes calculated from Table 1: PMV scale
simulations with ray tracing software Daysim. The PMV index is the average of the votes issued by a group
Each input variable pass through a Mamdani Fuzzy process of people exposed to the same environment. However, the
using a logistic sigmoid function. In this process each input is thermal environment in many cases is judged in a different
represented by a fuzzification. Each variable is coded as fuzzy manner by all occupants of the same room. For this reason,
function and it is evaluated by using certain rules of the PPD index provides a quantitative estimation of the
inference. number of people dissatisfied with the thermal environment is

3
defined. The PPD index is related to the PMV index using the
equation (2)
(2)
In Table 2, four thermal environment categories are defined:
The Matlab application is employed to develop the intelligent
algorithms and fusion all information of the different
luminaires, autonomous nodes and smart thermostat.
In addition, an open REST web service is implemented as
remote user interface for the internet of things (IoT) as shown
in Figure 7.

Category Acceptation PPD PMV

Level %
I High <6 -0.2 < PMV < 0.2
II Normal < 10 -0.5 < PMV <0.5
III Acceptable < 15 -0.7 < PMV < 0.7
unacceptable PMV < -0.7 y
IV >16
PMV > 0.7
Table 2: PMV thermal environment categories

Additional parameters in the model are the type of clothing

that varies in the different seasons in a year, and the metabolic
rate for people working in an office.
Every two minutes the algorithm calculates both index PMV
and PPD. Depending on the deviation of the temperature the
controller will change the category. If the probability is
greater than 10% of dissatisfied and depending on the sign of
the PMV index it should normally be between values (- <0.5)
indicating slightly cold or (<0.5) indicating slightly warm. In
both cases, the solenoid valves change the operational state to
control the chilled beam. Finally, the system also maintains a
hysteresis to prevent oscillations of the controller.
Figure 7: ThingSpeak REST Webservice [8]
An open data platform for the Internet of things (IoT) named
ThingSpeak [8] is used to design the REST web service. The
Matlab programs are located in an embedded PC while
overall information is stored in the cloud REST web service.
The authors evaluated the energetic impact of the control
system to estimate the actual energy efficiency of lighting and
the climate control system. Table 3 shows a summary of
power savings for the lighting system and the climate system.

Building Energy Savings

5 User interface office room kWh Percent (%)
Dec 2012 54.2
The software program of this study contains a Matlab GUI
shows in Figure 6. Dec 2013 30.55 43.6
Jan 2014 41.45 23.5
Table 3: power savings - smart lighting and climate system

The energy consumption has been measured in two months

obtaining important savings with the smart control system.

Figure 6 : Matlab user Interface
6 Conclusions
In particular, different control strategies in the lighting system
based on daylight obtains savings between (23%-43%)
including the dimming and room occupancy monitoring. In
addition by using pre-defined scenes and incorporating the
office work schedule, intelligent algorithms, manual or both
and using different management control strategies, the
effectiveness of smart lighting system will optimized
reducing costs and increasing the visual and thermal comfort
of the users based on quantitative indicators.

4
Acknowledgements

This project has received funding front the European Union

Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under
grant agreement no 619912.

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