Antoine Guillemin

An innovative lighting controller integrated in a self-adaptive building control system

An innovative and self-adaptive integrated system for building energy and comfort management has been developed. Both artificial and natural lighting controllers have been designed in order to fit the integrated approach. The shading device controller is split into two parts depending on the user presence. When the user is present, priority is given to visual comfort, and when he is absent, priority is given to thermal aspects (heating/cooling energy saving). The artificial lighting controller is used to complete the illuminance in the room up to the level desired by the user, which is learned by the system through the user wishes. Many simulations have allowed comparing different variants of the lighting controllers. The models used in the control system are regularly adapted to the measurements. Therefore, the system continuously adapts itself to the environment and the room characteristics. Four months of experiments in the occupied LESO-PB office building have demonstrated that this integrated system leads to interesting energy saving (25% less of total energy consumption) compared to a conventional one.

An energy-efficient controller for shading devices self-adapting to the user wishes

In order to improve the user acceptance of an automatic shading-device controller, user wishes concerning the blind position are learned and integrated in the automatic controller through an innovative adaptation system developed with the use of genetic algorithms (GA). The adaptation process is composed of three distinct modules: a wish pre-processing module that prevents from learning energetically bad user wishes, the GA engine module and a sensitivity filter that ensures no parameters are needlessly changed. The system has been tested with several sets of synthetic wishes and shows a powerful ability to find satisfactory solutions, even with complex combinations of wishes.

Experimental results of a self-adaptive integrated control system in buildings : a pilot study

Abstract An innovative integrated system for building energy and comfort management has been implemented on two occupied offices of the LESO-PB building. The measurements concern both energy consumption and comfort assessment. The results show that the system saves 19% of total energy consumption in comparison with a conventional heating controller with night setback. The thermal comfort level has been kept at a high level and the visual comfort has even been improved by the integrated control system. These good results are mainly explained by the integration concept of the overall controller and the energy efficient control of the blinds, which allow an optimal use of the passive solar gains. The user’s satisfaction has been studied; it highlights the need of a long-term adaptation of the controllers to the user’s wishes and preferences for a better acceptance of automatic control systems.