Center for Research in Energy Systems Transformation (CREST)

Lighting contributes a significant portion to the overall energy consumption in an office building. It is thus important to reduce the energy consumption of lighting systems especially for Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB). Maximizing daylight harvesting can significantly increase the energy savings. With increase in demand for satisfying occupant preferences in visual comfort, the need for personalized lighting in the office space is also rising. In this paper, a novel lighting control system for Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) is proposed which models the lighting system using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and utilizes this model with the Internal Model Control (IMC) principle for controller design. Modeling the lighting system using ANN reduces the challenge of modeling a large and complex system with inherent process variability without the need to analyze extensive data-sets. The proposed ANN-IMC controller uses feedback from sensors on the task table to maintain desired illuminance, is easy to tune with just one parameter and is robust to process variability. The proposed control design is applicable to square systems where the number of lights and number of sensors are equal. However, the proposed architecture can also be extended for controlling other lighting accessories such as roller blinds. The performance of the proposed lighting control system to harvest the daylight effectively is demonstrated using both simulation results and an experimental setup in test-bed environment. The versatility of the proposed system will allow an operator to deploy personalized lighting in an office space.