| An intelligent building is able to manage its indoor environment via computer technologies to optimize energy efficiency, occupants' wellbeing, safety and productivity. The main objective in intelligent building design is to satisfy occupants' need with high energy efficiency. As the primary task for a building control system, energy and comfort management aims to solve the conflict between improving users' satisfaction and reducing building energy consumption. In this dissertation, a multi-agent control system is developed to integrate building control systems and to coordinate operations in building subsystems. The developed multi-agent system facilitates the building to interact with its occupants to realize user-centered control.;Based on the framework of the developed multi-agent system, control strategies are proposed to improve energy efficiency through the intelligent control of the building subsystems. Intelligent controllers are developed for the decision-making process in building energy and comfort management. The developed controllers control the building subsystems that include heating, ventilation and air conditioning system, lighting system, geothermal heat pump system, and water loop heat pump system. The proposed control strategies improve the energy efficiency in subsystem operations while maintaining comfortable indoor environment. This dissertation also discusses the implementation of cloud computing to solve computationally intensive problems with less time and less cost in intelligent buildings. The cloud features certain limitations and vulnerabilities that may impact the performance of control system. The performance of the cloud based control system is evaluated. |
