Design of Supervisory Control for HVAC System in Hospital Building Considering Energy Saving and Thermal Comfort

This paper presents a design of supervisory control (SC) for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems in hospital buildings. The SC design aims to optimize the operating cost and the comfort level while meeting required hospital conditions. Disturbances are taken from historical data and estimations. These disturbances are incorporated into the mathematical model of the HVAC system to determine the optimal set-points of room temperature and humidity. The SC design is formulated as a quadratic program that trades off the operating cost and the thermal comfort. We apply the QR solver to find the optimal operating conditions. The simulation results show the benefits of SC design in reducing the operating cost and maintaining the comfort level. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the control of room temperature has a more significant impact on system performance than that of room humidity. It provides insights for optimizing lower control layers in HVAC management.