The stochastic nature of human preferences poses a unique challenge in buildings, where control configurations are usually shaped around standardized schemes. Although automating the operational tasks has been considered as a promising strategy to improve overall system efficiency by practitioners in the past two decades, simplified uniformity assumptions made in assessing comfort, defining control actions, and evaluating indoor environmental conditions lead to excessive use of energy and decreased levels of satisfaction for building occupants. Responding to the drawbacks of the one-size-fits-all approaches in the current practice, this lecture investigates personalized dimensions of building control, human comfort, and indoor climate. After introducing a novel collaborative control framework that establishes a communication ground between people and buildings, the applicability and optimization potentials of incorporating the aforementioned divergences in the thermal domain are discussed within the defined limits of a data-driven methodology.
Biography:
Dr. Fatih Topak received his Ph.D. in Building Science from Middle East Technical University. His research covers sustainable building practices, specifically focusing on understanding and optimizing the interplay between occupants, their well-being, and energy consumption in buildings. His studies have been published in various journals, including Building and Environment, Journal of Building Engineering, and Intelligent Buildings International. He contributes to a number of international collaborative studies on occupant-centric building design and personalized environmental control systems, stemming from the annex groups of the International Energy Agency’s Energy in Building and Communities Programme (IEA EBC). He was a visiting scholar at Penn State University for a year between 2021-2022. He currently works as a researcher in the Department of Architecture at METU, where he also engages in teaching activities on architectural design and building information modeling.
