The SPOT* System for Flexible Personal Heating and Cooling
The SPOT* System for Flexible Personal Heating and Cooling Alimohammad Rabbani and S. Keshav School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Technical Report CS-2015-02 ABSTRACT that workers are always comfortable. Building on our prior work on the SPOT and SPOT+ Smart Personalized Office Thermal control systems, this paper This work extends prior work on the SPOT and SPOT+ presents SPOT*, a cost-effective, flexible system for person- personal thermal control systems [?, ?]. Both systems use alized heating and cooling. Like its predecessors, SPOT* the Predicted Personal Vote (PPV) model (described be- senses occupancy and worker comfort to reactively control low) to automatically adjust room heating to maintain a office temperature. Specifically, it uses the Predicted Mean desired comfort level. SPOT is reactive, in that it only Vote equation to determine worker comfort and actuates a heats the room when the worker is actually present, and fan or a heater to adjust the comfort level so that it lies SPOT+ is pro-active, pre-heating the workspace before the between -0.5 and +0.5 in the ASHRAE comfort scale. Un- arrival of the worker, or turn off heating in anticipation of like the two prior systems, however, which use many sensors the worker's departure. SPOT* differs from both systems in and a per-user compute engine, SPOT* greatly reduces costs five significant ways. First, it controls both heating and cool- by using the fewest possible sensors and a lightweight com- ing, so can be used both in winter and in summer. Second, pute engine that can optionally even be located in the cloud.
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