COMOB: A MATLAB toolbox for sensor placement and contaminant event monitoring in multi-zone buildings

Abstract

The monitoring of the indoor air quality against the presence of contaminant sources is of paramount importance since it directly influences the occupants comfort, productivity, health and safety. Various approaches exist in the literature for monitoring and controlling the building environment. However, there is an identified lack of automated tools for evaluating, testing and comparing such approaches. This paper presents COMOB (COntaminat MOnitoring in Buildings), a developed MATLAB toolbox for sensor placement and contaminant monitoring in buildings. Specifically, the COMOB toolbox realizes an offline sensor placement procedure for positioning the contaminant sensors inside the building, such that the harmful effects due to a possible airborne contaminant event are minimized. In addition, an online contaminant monitoring approach is also implemented for detecting and isolating contaminant events in the building interior. Besides the aforementioned algorithms, the modularity of the COMOB toolbox facilitates the implementation of various other algorithms related to air-quality monitoring in buildings. In particular, the COMOB toolbox is able to generate multiple airflow and contaminant concentration data-sets by varying the building parameters; thus enabling the comprehensive and systematic evaluation and testing of the developed algorithms. Finally, the functionalities of the COMOB toolbox are demonstrated through a case-study corresponding to a real building model. COMOB is released under an open-source license, and is available at https://github.com/KIOS-Research/COMOB-Toolbox.