Building control systems

News and Updates

NIST Industrial Wireless Team Publishes Research Report on Wireless Deployment Challenges in Construction – A 5G Strategy

June 1, 2024

In the construction context, integrating 5G networks presents numerous challenges. The NIST Industrial Wireless Team has published an article in the online

University, NIST Researchers Create Residential Building Models to Evaluate Fairness of Electricity Tariffs

January 1, 2024

The increased adoption of energy technologies like smart meters, solar panels, and battery storage has led to a rise in electricity pricing plans with costs

University, NIST Researchers Develop Strategy for Cutting Home HVAC Electricity Costs

June 1, 2023

To help reduce electricity consumption and its costs, university and NIST researchers proposed a strategy for controlling residential heating, ventilation, and

Projects and Programs

Intelligent Building Agents

Ongoing

Objective - To demonstrate the feasibility of intelligent agent control techniques for reducing energy consumption in commercial buildings by optimizing the performance of interacting building systems and to create a research infrastructure suitable for ongoing development and testing of advanced

Building Integration with Smart Grid

Ongoing

Objective - To develop the measurement science for industry standards that will enable interconnection of home and building automation and control systems with a future "smart" utility grid, provide consumers with energy usage information, and support industry efforts to develop the needed standards

Smart Building Automation and Control Testbed and Standards

Completed

Objective - To enable the development of a new generation of commercial products for integrated cybernetic building systems and transform industry practices for building operations, through a combination of measurement science research enabled by state-of-the-art testbeds and direct involvement in

Semantic Interoperability for Building Data

Ongoing

Objective - To pursue an effort that results in national and international standards that define concepts and a methodology to create interoperable, machine-readable semantic models for representing building system information for analytics, automation, and control. What is the technical idea? The

Publications

Advanced Co-simulation Framework for Assessing the Interplay between Occupant Behaviors and Demand Flexibility in Commercial Buildings

September 2, 2024

Author(s)

Zhelun Chen, Jin Wen, Yicheng Li, L James Lo, Gabriel Grajewski, Vance (Wm.) Payne, Steven T. Bushby, Amanda Pertzborn, Zheng O'Neill, Zhiyao Yang, Caleb Calfa

With buildings contributing significantly to electricity usage, enabling demand flexibility becomes a challenge, especially when accounting for occupant comfort

Development of a Simulation Tool for the Intelligent Building Agents Project

August 1, 2024

Author(s)

Amanda Pertzborn

In the U.S., commercial buildings are responsible for approximately 36 % of total energy consumption, and the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC)

A framework for calibrating and validating an air loop dynamic model in an HVAC system in Modelica

September 6, 2023

Author(s)

Yicheng Li, Zhelun Chen, Jin Wen, Yangyang Fu, Amanda Pertzborn, Zheng O'Neill

The use of Modelica for simulating the dynamic behaviors of building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems has gained popularity

Development of a Bias Compensating Q-Learning Controller for a Multi-Zone HVAC Facility

August 1, 2023

Author(s)

Syed Ali Asad Rizvi, Amanda Pertzborn

We present the development of a bias compensating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that optimizes thermal comfort (by minimizing tracking error) and

Software

Tools and Instruments

Virtual Cybernetic Building Testbed

The NIST Virtual Cybernetic Building Testbed (VCBT) is a whole building emulator designed with enough flexibility to be capable of reproducibly simulating

Building control systems

News and Updates

NIST Industrial Wireless Team Publishes Research Report on Wireless Deployment Challenges in Construction – A 5G Strategy

University, NIST Researchers Create Residential Building Models to Evaluate Fairness of Electricity Tariffs

University, NIST Researchers Develop Strategy for Cutting Home HVAC Electricity Costs

Projects and Programs

Intelligent Building Agents

Building Integration with Smart Grid

Smart Building Automation and Control Testbed and Standards

Semantic Interoperability for Building Data

Publications

Advanced Co-simulation Framework for Assessing the Interplay between Occupant Behaviors and Demand Flexibility in Commercial Buildings

Development of a Simulation Tool for the Intelligent Building Agents Project

A framework for calibrating and validating an air loop dynamic model in an HVAC system in Modelica

Development of a Bias Compensating Q-Learning Controller for a Multi-Zone HVAC Facility

Software

HVAC-Cx Building HVAC Systems Commissioning Tool

The NIST Data Alignment Tool

HVAC SIMulation PLUS other systems (HVACSIM+)

Tools and Instruments

Virtual Cybernetic Building Testbed