The goal of this grant was to explore intelligent and personalized approaches that enable human-aware building operations and advance our knowledge about the impact of such approaches on energy efficiency reflected in energy use and human satisfaction in indoor environments. The project supported efforts to develop different algorithms and frameworks to enable non-intrusive monitoring of human thermoregulation response to ambient conditions using different modalities of sensing technologies and data analytics. These methods enable pattern recognition in biosignals that reflect occupants' thermal sensation and comfort. Accordingly, these techniques enable distributed measurement of thermal conditions in indoor environments by relying on the human body's response to indoor condition variations. Different sensing modalities were studied to measure various biosignals including blood volume variations at the skin surface, breathing patterns, and the heat flux on the skin. Algorithmic frameworks were investigated for robust analysis of these biosignals in the presence of noise in the environment. These explorations were carried out in varied indoor environmental conditions to study the human response under transient indoor conditions. Different data analysis frameworks were proposed to help learn individual preferences for different sensing modalities. Using personalized comfort models and leveraging an agent-based simulation, a control strategy was developed to account for personal thermal comfort preferences and sensitivities in the control loop for thermal conditioning in multi-occupancy scenarios. Moreover, a human-centered co-optimization control strategy was developed to balance the trade-off between energy use and the thermal comfort of occupants. These control strategies were evaluated in simulation environments to quantify the energy efficiency bounds considering the uncertainty in the diversity of individual differences in thermal comfort. Furthermore, studies were carried out to leverage human-building interactions to understand the dynamics of occupants in buildings including occupancy patterns in residential buildings and occupants' adaptive behaviors. Through an interactive online experiment, studies were conducted to understand how smart home artificial intelligence agents influence occupants to take energy-saving actions by providing adaptive behavior suggestions. Various influential factors including thermal comfort preferences and sensitivities were studied to provide insight into the underlying reasons for the observed effects on behaviors. Findings through these research efforts support the design and implementation of human-centered operational strategies for built environments with higher efficiencies.

This project advances our understanding of the impact of human-aware operations in buildings for improved adaptive control of indoor thermal conditions. These adaptations could contribute to improvement in energy management in the built environments by enabling intelligent environments that integrate the response from the human body and adjust operations to be energy efficient while preserving occupants’ comfort. Leveraging these adaptive operational strategies could contribute to operations that balance the trade-off between energy and comfort and lead to more acceptable autonomous technologies. This project supported the research of multiple Ph.D. students. In addition, several summer outreach activity workshops were held in collaboration with the Center for Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED) at Virginia Tech. These activities (which spanned over several summers during the project) were focused on programs that engage different cohorts of students from minority groups in STEM fields and at different levels from middle school to high school. Different hands-on minds-on activities were designed to present the students with important topics in human-centered building operations for energy conservation and encourage them to consider higher education and careers in relevant areas. Students were engaged in these activities to learn the fundamentals of energy management in buildings and how technological advances could support improved operations in buildings. Furthermore, several undergraduate students were engaged in research activities through the REU supplement. The contributions and findings of this work were disseminated in multiple peer-reviewed publications, as well as conference talks and invited presentations.

Last Modified: 09/30/2022
Modified by: Farrokh Jazizadeh Karimi