Building power control and comfort management using genetic programming and fuzzy logic

Abstract

In the last couple of years, energy management in the building environment has been a topic of interest to the research community. A number of renowned methods exist in the literature for energy management in buildings, but the trade-off between occupants comfort level and energy consumption is still a major challenge and needs more attention. In this paper, we propose a power control model for comfort and energy saving, using a fuzzy controller and genetic programming (GP). Our focus is to increase the occupants’ comfort index and to minimize the energy consumption simultaneously. First, we implemented a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to optimize the environmental parameters. Second, we control the environment using fuzzy logic and third, we predict the consumed power using GP. The environmental and comfort parameters considered are temperature, illumination and air quality. At the end of the work we compare the power consumption results with and without prediction. The results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed technique in getting the solution for the above mentioned problem.