HVAC control and comfort management in non-residential buildings

In France, non-residential buildings account for a sig-nificant part in energy consumption. Moreover, a large part of this consumption is due to Heating, Ventila-tion and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems, which are generally badly handled. So, the present work deals with an efficient approach allowing energy consump-tion to be minimized while ensuring thermal comfort. In this sense, a predictive control strategy is proposed for existing zoned HVAC systems considering the Pre-dicted Mean Vote (PMV) index as a thermal comfort indicator. In order to test the developped strategy in simulation, a non-residential building located in Per-pignan (south of France) has been modelled using the EnergyPlusTM software. The aim is to limit the times during which the HVAC sub-system is turned on and to ensure a satisfactory thermal comfort during work-ing time. This approach, computationally tractable, al-lows thermal comfort requirements to be met without wasting energy.