Building Automation Case Study
The building use case will focus on modelling and analysis of energy and comfort management of an area inside a building premise. Considering for example a room area, the two main components of the room will be a) the Fan Coil Unit (FCU) and b) the room thermostat. In more detail:
- FCU is attached to the room in order to control the heating and the flow of the air inside the room. Temperature of the air is managed by two water pumps each of which has varied flow controlled by the FCU in order to provide the exact set point of temperature requested by the user. Controller of the FCU is embedded on the device taking inputs-commands from the room thermostat that the end-user had access.
- Room thermostat is the device where the end-user is providing room temperature set-points. Set-points are provided as input to the FCU which accordingly regulates the valves positions of the cooled/heated water pumps and the speed of the fan in order to reach the requested temperature inside the room.
- Main objectives will be to respect user-comfort requirements in the room level while keeping energy consumption at the minimum level.
- Within INTO-CPS baseline technologies we aim into co-modelling both the FCU and the thermostat operation for specific user-comfort and energy consumption requirements. We are going to explore modelling of control functions of the FCU with different technologies/tools provided by the INTO-CPS partners in order to extract/develop new model results. INTO-CPS tools will also be used for describing the core functionality of the room thermostat that is crucial part for providing inputs to the room HVAC system.
Challenges to be addressed in the building use case will include the efficient traceability of requirements within the INTO-CPS tool-chain usage as well as the enabling new cyber-physical analysis when co-simulating heterogeneous but collaborative components.