An IoT-Enabled Control Paradigm for Building Process Control: An Experimental Study

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have attracted increasing attention in the building automation (BA) and smart building fields, successful in various applications. However, there is no reported implementation of applying IoT technologies in building process control, which is one of the basic BA functions. The capability of IoT and feasibility of building process controls crossing networks considering risks of network constraints are also not yet evaluated. This study, therefore, proposes and experimentally evaluates an IoT-enabled process control paradigm as an alternative for the next-generation of BA systems. The proposed IoT-enabled paradigm involves the integration architecture of field-level smart IoT devices and wireless IoT control networks as well as cross-network data exchange. The performance of the building process control empowered with IoT technologies is also experimentally tested. A typical process in buildings, i.e., supply air temperature control of an air-handling unit, is adopted for the test and evaluation while compared with the conventional paradigm. A networked enhanced control strategy is also proposed to fit the new control paradigm and to improve the robustness when facing the network constraints. The results show that the proposed IoT-enabled control paradigm has good capacity for field-level process controls in buildings, and the enhanced control strategy has significantly improved robustness when compared with that using conventional process control strategies directly deployed in the networked IoT environment.