Sense and sensibility - The utility of HVAC sensors for large zones

The approach is evaluated through data from a real-world office building. Key findings include: (1) sensing population accurately requires higher number of sensors than sensing temperature. (2) Under steady-state, maximum actuation-utility of sensing at finer spatial resolutions increases with number of actuators. (3) For a real-world case, the maximum actuation-utility was ∼30%. After accounting for system inertia, the maximum and average actuation-utility of sensing were 22% and 5% respectively. This suggests that frequently occurring occupancy patterns influence the average utility of finer-sensing.