Physics-Informed Building Occupancy Detection: a Switching Process with Markov Regime

Energy efficiency of buildings is considered to be one of the major means of achieving the net-zero carbon goal around the world. The big part of the energy savings are supposed to be coming from optimizing the operation of the building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Ther...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2024-09
Main Authors: Amir-Mohammad Esmaieeli-Sikaroudi, Goikhman, Boris, Chubarov, Dmitri, Hung Dinh Nguyen, Chertkov, Michael, Vorobev, Petr
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air conditioning
Autoregressive processes
Carbon
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide concentration
Energy efficiency
Green buildings
Optimization
Ventilation
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Summary:Energy efficiency of buildings is considered to be one of the major means of achieving the net-zero carbon goal around the world. The big part of the energy savings are supposed to be coming from optimizing the operation of the building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. There is a natural trade-off between the energy efficiency and the indoor comfort level, and finding an optimal operating schedule/regime requires knowing the occupancy of different spaces inside of the building. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed the need to sustain the high quality of the indoor air in order to reduce the risk of spread of infection. Occupancy detection from indoor sensors is thus an important practical problem. In the present paper, we propose detection of occupancy based on the carbon dioxide measurements inside the building. In particular, a new approach based on the, so-called, switching auto-regressive process with Markov regime is presented and justified by the physical model of the carbon dioxide concentration dynamics. We demonstrate the efficiency of the method compared to simple Hidden Markov approaches on simulated and real-life data. We also show that the model is flexible and can be generalized to account for different ventilation regimes, simultaneously detecting the occupancy and the ventilation rate.
ISSN:2331-8422