Experimental study on modelling and control of lighting components in a test-cell building

The perfect control of shading devices, particularly venetian blinds can significantly improve the rational use of daylight in buildings and provide enhanced visual comfort for occupants while saving the electricity that would be used for artificial lighting. This study proposes a control strategy for building lighting components including daylighting and artificial lighting to automatically adjust the amount of light level (or the illuminance) in an office building as required and block direct sunlight from entering the office when necessary. The proposed control strategy is based on a hybrid statecharts model mainly consisting of a supervisor control system that chooses appropriate control actions for a current sky condition depending on the sky ratio and clearness index. These control actions are implemented to automatically adjust the blind height and slat angle, and turn on the artificial lighting only when needed. Real experiments on the test-cell case study demonstrating the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed control strategy are presented and discussed at the end of this paper.