Most of the current studies and solutions developed for building temperature control have been designed independent of the occupant feedback. An acceptable temperature range for the occupancy level is estimated, and control input is designed to maintain temperature within that range during occupancy hours. In this work we have incorporated active user feedback so as to minimize the aggregate user discomfort taking into account the total energy cost to design the optimal control input. The focus is on a multi-zone building, with lumped heat transfer model based on thermal resistance and capacitance for system analysis. We provide a stability analysis and establish convergence of the proposed solution to a desired temperature that minimizes the sum of energy cost and aggregate user discomfort. Simulation results on a four-room example are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach and validate the model.
IFAC World Congress, Aug 2014, Capetown, South Africa.