Energy Consumption Optimization and User Comfort Management in Residential Buildings Using a Bat Algorithm and Fuzzy Logic

Energy management in residential buildings has grabbed the attention of many scientists for the last few years due to the fact that the residential sector consumes the highest amount of total energy produced by different energy resources. To manage the energy in residential buildings effectively, an efficient energy control system is required, capable of decreasing the total energy consumption without compromising the user-preferred environment inside the building. In the literature, many approaches have been proposed to achieve the goals of minimizing the energy consumption and maximizing the user preferred comfort by keeping different parameters under consideration, but all these methods face some problems in resolving the issue properly. The bat algorithm is one of the most recently introduced optimization approaches that has drawn the attention of researchers to apply it for solving different types of optimization problems. In this paper, the bat algorithm is applied for energy optimization in residential buildings, which is one of the most focused optimization problems in recent years. Three environmental parameters, namely temperature, illumination and air quality are bat algorithm inputs and optimized values of these parameters are the outputs. The error difference between the environmental parameters and optimized parameters are inputs of the fuzzy controllers which give energy as output which in turn change the status of the concerned actuators. It is proven from the experimental results that the proposed approach has been effectively successful in managing the whole energy consumption management system.