Human in the Loop: perceived-based control as the key to enhance buildings’ performance

The Energy Performance Gap (EPG) is a phenomenon that both can be encountered in new and in refurbished buildings and potentially jeopardises the effort of making buildings more sustainable. Often, buildings are affected by a more generic “performance gap”, meaning that, beside the EPG, also the comfort delivered to the occupants is not as requested. In this work, we present a Human-in-the-Loop (HuiL) approach to control buildings. We developed a mobile app that allows occupants to provide their personal feedback about their indoor thermal sensation in real time, while monitoring their actual location within the building. Based on the thermal sensation votes, the system is capable of controlling the settings of smart thermostats in each room of a building. We tested the mobile app and a preliminary feedback-based manual control of the thermostats in a school building located in the Greater Copenhagen Area. Preliminary results show a higher comfort, when using the HuiL perception-based control approach: in particular, the answer “good”, used to positively rate the indoor temperature, was chosen 50,9% of times in a period with standard set points, and 63,3% of times in a periodwhile the set points of the smart thermostats of the classrooms were chosen based on a HuiL perception-based control.