Modelling An Occupancy-Based Hvac System Controller for Building Energy Efficiency

Kustija, Jaja
Muhammad, Raihan Zhifhanur
Fahrizal, Diki
Surya, Irgi

Gunung Djati Conference Series
Vol. 61 No. 1 (2025): International Conference of the 17th OISAA’s International Symposium Türkiye

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are major energy consumers in commercial buildings, often accounting for nearly half of total energy usage. A primary source of inefficiency is conventional operation that ignores occupancy patterns, leading to unnecessary conditioning of unoccupied spaces. This paper presents a simulation study of an occupancy-based HVAC control system using a simplified first-order thermal model of a building space. Three control strategies are compared: a baseline system without active control, a reactive On-Off controller, and a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller tuned using the Ziegler-Nichols method. Both the On-Off and PID controllers are integrated with an occupancy model to enable adaptive operation. Simulation results show that the occupancy-based PID controller achieves the best performance in balancing energy efficiency and thermal comfort compared to the other strategies. In addition, this work highlights a planned extension toward intelligent control methods, such as Deep Reinforcement Learning (DQN), to provide more adaptive and robust HVAC operation in dynamic environments.