7th Seminar on Neural Network Applications in Electrical Engineering, NEUREL-2004

cURy of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro, September 2125.2004
04
Control of Heating, Ventilation and Air
Conditioning System Based on Neural
Network
hl j ko M. DuroviC and Branko D. KovaZeviC
Faculty of Electrical Engineering
University of Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro
Abstract: The HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) car unit may be
considered as a very complex multiple-input multiple-output system with the basic target to
make the car passengers feeling comfortably. The system inputs are: air temperature, actual
temperature in the passenger compartment, sun load, vehicle speed, desired temperature set by
the driver or co-driver, air recirculation request and defrost request. The last two inputs are
binary signals. The system outputs are defined by the actuators located in the HVAC unit:
defrost door position (it controls the air distribution betweenthe defrost registers and penal-
feet registers), mode door position (it controls the air distribution between the penal and feet
registers), blend door position that mixtures hot and cold air, recirculation door position that
makes a difference between the fresh air input and recirculation and the last output is the
blower speed. The system that has to be controlled is quite nonlinear and non-stationary and
there are two important criteria that have to be fulfilled. The first of them is the passengers
comfort and this criterion is vague, hardly defined numerically. In order to acquire some
training sets many test trips have been made. Car companies usually organize three test trips
trying to cover extreme temperature and weather environments. One of them is during
summer choosing some hot destinations in Spain, Portugal or North Africa. The second trip is
during the winters with the destinations in North Europe and the third trip is so cold mild
trip usually organized in Middle Europe. The set of characteristic training values that may be
collected during these trips is usually not enough for training of neural networks.
This paper presents the algorithm how to design the simulator in order to gcncrate
enough data necessary to train the networks. These data must be consistent with the data
collected during the trips. Also, the paper proposes the architecture and the training algorithm
for the neural networks that control the actuators in the HVAC unit. The obtained results
demonstrate the accuracy and the simplicity of the proposed solutions.
The Organizing Committee of the NEUREL-2004 regrets its inability to obtain the manuscript
prior to printing the Proceedings!
0-7803-8547-0/@4/$20.00 02004 IEEE 37