A verification test bed for building control strategy coupling TRNSYS with a real controller

Advanced control systems are widely applied in modern buildings so as to meet the requirements of energy conservation and higher level of indoor environmental quality. The building control strategies need to be assessed and verified before applying to buildings, by either experiments or simulation. Verification by simulation can saves time and labour. However, there is no single building performance simulation tool that offers sufficient capabilities and flexibilities to accommodate the ever increasing complexity and rapid innovations in control systems and technologies. Therefore, a hardware-in-the-loop verification test bed coupling software-TRNSYS with a real DDC (direct digital controller) is developed combining the strengths of software and hardware to evaluate the performance of control strategies more quickly and accurately. State-of-art building control strategies are selected to be assessed by this test bed and the assessment results are analyzed.