Supervisory control of indoor environment systems to minimise the carbon footprint of airport terminal buildings - A review

Abstract

The awareness on the ever more accurate scientific evidence confirming the use of fossil energy as the major recipe for climate change has resulted in renewed economic and political pressure which has prompted the aviation industries and its infrastructures to be reset within the concept of reducing the effect of global warming and reducing maintenance and operating cost. Airport terminal buildings, different in contents and functions to other commercial buildings, are among the most energy consuming buildings. Also airport buildings contain components that are complex, non-linear but dynamically related. While energy saving techniques exists for new airport buildings, most of the existing airport terminal buildings will be in operation for the next 50 years. The engineering response being considered in this paper to the problems of carbon emission in existing terminal buildings is the control and integration of active and passive indoor environment systems in response to external conditions and passenger flow. This paper discusses the unique nature, the comfort criteria, the control set-points, control strategy for the indoor microclimates of the airport terminal building. An initial approach to designing an innovative supervisory controller as a retrofitting part-way to improve the intelligence, sensitivity and integratabilty of the existing indoor environment control infrastructure in a UK Airport together with the process of using a computer software SIMBAD as a virtual environment for building control will be presented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.