Beyond comfort - Managing the impact of HVAC control on the outside world

CSIRO's Intelligent Energy HVAC research program considers a trichotomy of design principles which must be balanced while providing cost effective operating schedules. Specifically, we consider: 1) Reducing the impact of the HVAC system on the electricity network (demand management); 2) Reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and 3) Achieving thermal comfort for building occupants. This approach has been utilised to develop an intelligent HVAC supervisory control system that utilises multi-agent systems science and machine learning techniques to automatically learn HVAC system behaviour. This is then used to evaluate different control scenarios to determine optimal HVAC control setpoints and operating schedules. Performance is being field verified in commercial building deployments in south-eastern Australia. Theoretical analysis has shown greenhouse gas reductions of up to 30% without loss of thermal comfort, while initial deployments have achieved CO ₂ and HVAC energy savings of 10-15% with further savings expected following the full implementation of our system.