Green Buildings: Optimization and Adaptation

Cource Description

Buildings account for 40% of all energy in the United States and 70% of all electricity. Recent information technology developments such as sensor/actuator networks, optimization, learning, and control, will be critical in reducing the energy consumption of green buildings. This special topics course will focus on state-of-the-art models, tools, and approaches and pose research projects for students. Topics that will be considered are:

1. Building modeling and simulation

   • HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning) system

   • Lighting system

   • Interdependency: coupling HVAC-lighting-human

2. Building & HVAC control

   • Conventional control

   • Advanced control

3. Building sensing

   • Sensor network for buildings

   • Sensor placement

4. Building-Human interaction

   • Occupancy sensors

   • Usage pattern learning

5. Smart Grid-Building interaction

   • Dynamic pricing

   • Buildings as agents in the Smart Grid

   • Energy market

6. Campus-wide optimization

   • Energy-aware scheduling

7. Data centers and IT-heavy buildings

8. Fault detection and diagnostics

   • Fault detection and diagnostics (FDD)

   • Fault-tolerant control

The class will also schedule guest lectures as well as site visits to building and campus energy management centers. This course is organized in light of a new Philadelphia-based federal project to design energy-efficient buildings (press release, website).

Instructors

• Prof. George J. Pappas, Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering.

• Prof. Ben Taskar, Department of Computer and Information Science.

Time and Location

For Spring 2011, class will meet on Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:00-3:30 PM, in Levine 307.

Pre-requisites

CIS-520 or ESE-504 or permission of instructors.

Grading and Course Requirements

Course grade will be based on:

1. Reading of relevant papers

2. Presentation of papers

3. Class participation

4. Class project: sample projects include but not limited to

   1. Using green building software tools

   2. Instrumenting existing buildings

   3. Literature survey

   4. Algorithm development