COUPLING BUILDING SIMULATION WITH A HARDWARE REAL- TIME CONTROLLER

The main part of energy consumption in modern buildings is used for establishing an acceptable indoor environment quality (IEQ) for work and living. Modern commercial and industrial buildings are usually equipped with building automation systems (BAS) and building energy management systems (BEMS) to achieve the required IEQ. Successful management and operational quality of these systems varies and significantly depends on initialization and “tuning” procedures within the first year of building operation. Simulation has a role to play in establishing suitable control strategies and potentially in assisting in real-time control decisions. This paper outlines the theory of simulation assisted control capability within the ESP-r transient thermal simulation program and presents a new data synchronization mechanism for communication between a virtual building model and a real-time controller. The paper also describes the first phase of experiments realized to test the prediction accuracy of the B2E algorithm in ESP-r and to calibrate the model of the experimental facility. The positive results are discussed in relation to a second experiment which connects ESP-r with an actual BEMS. This methodology can be used for estimation of the optimal initialization on a real building with a pre-tuned controller.