Design and evaluation of hybrid temperature control for cyber-physical home systems

The design of control systems is crucial for improving the comfort level of the home environment. Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) can offer numerous opportunities to design highly efficient control systems. In this paper, we focus on the design and evaluation of temperature control systems. By using the idea of CPS, a hybrid temperature control (HTC) system is proposed. Through an energy efficient temperature control (EETC) algorithm, the HTC system maintains the room temperature in the desired interval. In the tight integration of physical and cyber worlds, the sensing accuracy of the physical platform has significant impact on the performance of the HTC system. Through simulations and field experiments, the relationship between control performance and sensing accuracy is captured. A fitting function method is proposed to improve the sensing accuracy without increasing the monetary cost of the system implementation. By using this method, the performance of the HTC system can be increased significantly.