A Decision Support System for Comfort optimization in a Smart Retirement Home

Abstract

The satisfaction of thermal comfort and indoor air quality conditions is one of the main objectives in the design of residential aged care homes such as retirement homes. Furthermore, in this context, the integration of building automation systems can both help the user to interact easier with the building components, and at the same time allows guaranteeing an adequate level of indoor comfort. The aim of this work is to design a Decision Support System able to improve indoor comfort by responding to occupants actions and preferences inside a room unit of a retirement home. In particular, optimized control logics for building automation systems are designed to minimize discomfort conditions within a smart room unit. The indoor environmental conditions and the user thermal-hygrometric comfort are estimated by means of the Fanger’s comfort theory, by evaluating the Predicted Mean Vote and the Percentage of Person Dissatisfied indices. With the aim of determining the optimal activation ranges of the Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning systems that minimize the thermal discomfort conditions, several simulations are conducted by varying the activation temperature set points. The results show how the integration of automation systems may provide significant thermal discomfort reductions by optimizing the air conditioning activation timing.