Towards Energy Efficiency: Forecasting Indoor Temperature via Multivariate Analysis
For smart home energy management, this work provides a method to forecast indoor temperature to optimize HVAC energy use, but it is incremental as it applies existing ANN methods to a specific house dataset.
This paper presents a forecasting system based on artificial neural networks to predict indoor temperature in a solar-powered house, achieving high accuracy that could enable energy-efficient HVAC control, where HVAC accounts for 53.9% of total power consumption.
The small medium large system (SMLSystem) is a house built at the Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera (CEU-UCH) for participation in the Solar Decathlon 2013 competition. Several technologies have been integrated to reduce power consumption. One of these is a forecasting system based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which is able to predict indoor temperature in the near future using captured data by a complex monitoring system as the input. A study of the impact on forecasting performance of different covariate combinations is presented in this paper. Additionally, a comparison of ANNs with the standard statistical forecasting methods is shown. The research in this paper has been focused on forecasting the indoor temperature of a house, as it is directly related to HVAC---heating, ventilation and air conditioning---system consumption. HVAC systems at the SMLSystem house represent 53.9% of the overall power consumption. The energy used to maintain temperature was measured to be 30--38.9% of the energy needed to lower it. Hence, these forecasting measures allow the house to adapt itself to future temperature conditions by using home automation in an energy-efficient manner. Experimental results show a high forecasting accuracy and therefore, they might be used to efficiently control an HVAC system.