Development an Adaptive Incremental Fuzzy PI Controller for a HVAC System

This paper presents an adaptive incremental fuzzy PI controller (AIFPI) for a heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) system capable of maintaining comfortable conditions under varying thermal loads. The HVAC system has two subsystems and is used to control indoor temperature and humidity in a thermal zone. As the system has strong-coupling and non-linear characteristics, fixed PI controllers have poor control performance and more energy consumption. Aiming to solve the problem, fuzzy control and PI control are combined together organically. In the proposed control scheme, the error of the system output and its derivative are taken as two parameters necessary to adapt the proportional (P) and integral (I) gains of the PI controller based on fuzzy reasoning according to practical control experiences. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control methods in the HVAC system, it is compared with a fixed well-tuned PI controller. The results demonstrate that the AIFPI controller has more superior performance than the latter.