Visual comfort control for building energy management system

In this paper, we propose a two-stage energy saving control algorithm to resolve the visual comfort control problem of building energy management systems (BEMS). The first stage control method consists of a fuzzy controller to control the venetian blind so as to exploit the outdoor luminance as much as possible while avoiding the sun glare. To remedy the possible imperfection caused by the fuzzy controller, a follow up fine tuning step is designed to adjust the outputs of the venetian blind resulted from the fuzzy controller. The second stage control is to determine whether to turn on the light based on the luminance measured by the sensor after the first stage control so as to save electricity. We have simulated the proposed two-stage control algorithm and demonstrate that the electricity saving can be up to 61% in the tested room.