Presence based adaptive control for indoor building lighting

When dealing with buildings the main energy demand is related to the occupants presence, therefore in the proposed work we focussed on how to build effective control rules in order to manage indoor lighting as function of the presence level. The basic idea is that the lights of the common spaces (i.e. corridors) can be switched off, by a remote control system based on ict technologies, when the presence level is under a certain threshold. We carried out a study to properly set this threshold as function of the energy saving and then we applied the strategy on a real test case. Both the preliminary study and the experimentation have been carried out on a real office building. In the experimentation we compared three different control strategies : manual, programmed and adaptive. Results, coming from several months of real data, showed that adaptive control clearly outperforms the other strategies with remarkable energy savings.
European Energy Conference; 10/2013