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Abstract— In the air-polluted area or period, the outdoor effectiveness of the municipal emergency measures, with
activities are unhealthy and even become the triggers for lowest value controlled within 10 micrograms per cubic
different kinds of diseases because of the inhalable particles. meter which represents a good air quality.
Most of the outdoor activities are transferred into indoor
lifestyle, such as entertainments, sports and working. And it In the air-polluted area or period, lots of school,
is highly unlikely to get fresh air by ventilating directly with factories and organizations are shut down. And most of the
outside air, while CO2 content will persistently increase in outdoor activities are transferred into indoor-mode, such as
the enclosed space so as to oppress people of oxygen-poor entertainments, sports and working.
feeling. On the other hand, the rapid technology
development and the urgent requirement growth of wireless
sensors simultaneously offer a possible solution for such
contradiction. For the sake of the health and comfort of the
indoor inhabitants, a fuzzy control method is proposed in
this paper for controlling the actuators of air cleaner and
ventilator. With a good coordination between the air-
cleaners and the ventilator, an intelligent environment which
meets the comfort level with good air quality can be
achieved. Exercise experiments which last for six days are
carried out with comparisons among three controlling
algorithms in the changing outdoor environments. Results
show a satisfaction from overlapping working mode based
on fuzzy control algorithm. Such algorithm has a broad
application prospect on the existing buildings for air-
polluted area.
I. INTRODUCTION (HEADING 1)
Fig. 1. Satellite haze image over Beijing[1]
Haze is traditionally an atmospheric phenomenon
where dust, smoke and other dry particles obscure the
clarity of the sky, being unlikely eradicated in a relative
short period of time. There are several hypotheses about
the main factors and how these inhalable particles formed.
Taking Beijing for example, it is embraced on three sides
and located where the North China Plain meets the
Taihang Mountains. Such special geographical situation
can easily gather particulates but hardly evanish. As we
can see in Fig.1, the satellite picture shows particulate haze
suspending over Beijing. Fig. 2. Air pollution PM2.5 (ȝg/m3) in 30 days of Beijing[2]
These inhalable particles (especially PM2.5, fine
particulate matter with diameter less than 2.5 micrometer) Though a massive scale pollution is uncontrollable for
do harm human body directly for outdoor-activity people. individual inhabitants, it is possible to reduce the pollution
Especially in the winter, the ongoing municipal heating impacts appropriately by preventive indoor actions [3].
brings in much more power consumption which results in However, the amount of indoor oxygen is limited in the
much more air pollution. enclosed space and will decrease as time goes on, as the
Within 30 days in winter (since mid-November to mid- people number increasing or the exercises intensity. The
December), the highest level of PM2.5 triggers red alert content CO2 will persistently increase to oppress people of
and even rises to 480 micrograms per cubic meter of air oxygen-poor feeling. But we could not open the door or
while the most dangerous line is 500. As shown in Fig.2, window directly for the “fresh air” oxygen from outside
the drastic fluctuation of PM2.5 value briefly explains the polluted air because of PM2.5. Therefore, an air cleaner is
978-1-5090-0626-7/16/$31.00 2016
c IEEE 678
necessary to cooperate with the ventilator to ensure the good coordination of working time and loads, an
comfort level and good air quality at the same time. There intelligent environment which meets the comfort level with
is an imminent need for a widely-accessible IAQ (Indoor good air quality can be achieved without manual operation.
Air Quality) monitoring system that can provide intuitive
sense of air quality conditions in indoor environments [4]. II. SMART GYM SYSTEM DESIGN
A good air quality, however, could not be achieved by The function structure of smart home contains several
just monitoring the air condition. A pivotal system which aspects, including smart home host, indoor monitor &
should be involved to solve the indoor-air pollution is inductor, security & intercom, and the executive module
Smart Control System, which is commonly used to for intelligent environment, as shown in Fig.3. All the
integrate various home automation devices and expanding devices in this function structure are the related products
rapidly as electronic technologies converge [5, 6]. With the from UIOT-company except the intercom terminal.
rapid technology development, it is possible to solve the
contradiction as mentioned above. The smart home host is the center for home network
and local control, which adopts ARM cortex-A8
Based on the application perspective of Internet of architecture and 45nm processor. By combining the
Things (IoT), the sensor technology and intelligence ZigBee smart-hardware devices, the smart home host can
embedded technology can be developed to deal with the receive monitoring and inducting data and then direct the
issues especially for the decision-making level based on executive module to work coordinately. These devices are
indoor environment and target state estimation [7, 8]. With is based on the wireless sensors which are distributed
forward application of wireless sensor network, the smart according to the information gathering requirements.
home system can be designed smarter and more efficient
[9, 10]. The smart lock and the intercom terminal can record
the access records for individual person and transmit data
Furthermore, the hardware system of smart home can to the smart home center. On the other hand, magnetic
be designed based on ZigBee technology through the window sensors of can detect whether the window is open
wireless networking of multiple monitoring and controlling or not. Intelligent environment box can assemble different
devices, which provides a feasible method for intelligent sensors for temperature, humidity, methanol, and so on.
home [11]. Wireless devices based on the ZigBee protocol Since we concern the concentrations of CO2 and PM2.5
are provided as individual nodes for the smart home here, corresponding sensors for these two matters are
network. As to focus on the balance controlling of air installed in the intelligent environment box to feed data
cleaner and ventilator, a suitable algorithm is critical that back to the host.
should be developed in advance.
The final decisions for the executive module are from
In addition to identifying and differentiating the the host which experts at decision-making based on the
characteristics of perspective users and their possible needs gleaned data abovementioned. If the outdoor air quality is
[12], there is a growing trend of automatically updating good and the magnetic sensor gets a judgment of open
model to reflect the pattern/schedule changes and adapting window, the window opener will be activated to close the
to the user’s explicit or implicit wishes [13, 14]. For the window. Otherwise, if the indoor air quality cannot reach
multifunctional controllable system, the minimum human the air health standard, the air cleaner will be open at the
intervention [15] can not only liberate the inhabitant’s corresponding power level to eliminate PM2.5. And if the
labor and attention, but also be convenient to adjust the indoor air contains too much CO2 which makes people
system toward the data-based intelligent environment with uncomfortable, the ventilator will be open for
cost-effective algorithm. Thus intelligent systemic corresponding work time.
solutions for smart home are advanced by observing,
learning and adapting the resident’s activities toward
intelligent home environments, including various
computational intelligence techniques [13].
Among these solutions, Fuzzy logic controller is the
most effective in the learning for the codependence of the
environment and emerging situations [16]. Fuzzy
algorithms involved contain several different aspects of
applications, including thermal-comfort and air-condition
controlling [17-19], human emotion analyzing [20], laser-
pointer detection for handicapped [21], characterizing
behavior of sensor nodes with soft boundaries [22], and
constructing ambient intelligent environments [20, 23, 24].
For the sake of the health and comfort of the indoor
inhabitants, a fuzzy control algorithm is proposed in this
paper in allusion to the actuators of air cleaner and
ventilator based on the data collected from monitoring
sensors to overcome the aforementioned challenge. These
function modulates are pivotal executive parts of receiving
commands from decision-making system, which calculates Fig. 3. Smart home structure based on products of UIOT
corresponding control decisions and then forward them to
the intelligent environment based on the sensors on-service As shown in Fig.4, there are three main parts in the
to collect information from ambient environment. With the intelligent gym which are suitable for urban communities.
III. FUZZY NATURE OF HEALTH AND COMFORT LEVEL Fig. 5. Fuzzy mapping between the exercise energy and comfort level
In the beginning of this paper, we are emphatically
focusing on the balance problem between the healthy level The content of CO2, p tCO , is monitored based on the
2
and the comfort level of indoor environment, involving combination of the expiration from volunteers and the
ventilation for Oxygen-rich air and filtration for high- ventilating efficiency. In the same content environment,
PM2.5 air. Such balance requires the solution for the the ith volunteer at his/her own exercise stage ei will
aforementioned contrast by utilizing a suitable control classify the air condition into the corresponding comfort
algorithm. Therefore, the primary basic information is to level ci, and ci ∈ [0,1] where value 1 means subjective
find the decision/strategy target for indoor-occupants’ comfort feeling while 0 means discomfort. The subjective
physical health and comfort. According to IAQ Standard in category of the exercise stage ei belongs to one of the
Chinese national standard (GB) and World Health fuzzy subset of Energy, i.e. energetic, sustained, endure or
Organization (WHO), the content limits of different exhausted. With the increasing of exercise time t (t 105
physical elements are listed as seen in Table I. min, within a time domain [0,105]), the energy level would
be classified correspondingly from energetic to exhausted,
named with E1, E2, E3 and E4, respectively. The
TABLE I. INDOOR AIR QUALITY STANDARD PARAMETER relationship between the exercise time and the energy
Data & Source
estimation state is shown in Fig.6.
Parameter
Unit Value Source
CO2 % 0.10 GB/T 18883
Membership Degree
Works as shown above have the primary efforts to Outdoor CO2 content pCO2_OUT % 0.038
record the subjective feelings from the exercisers in the
same environment with different energy states. However,
the contents of PM2.5 cannot be directly felt by human The indoor air condition has been formed as a dynamic
body for the tiny size of the inhalable particulates. system with the changing feelings from volunteers based
on their exercise states. The overall estimate from all of the
In order to carry out this test, the ventilator used in this volunteers are counted through Eq.(8). The Comfort means
gym is same with the ones in the existing residential an average comfort level voted from all of the volunteers.
buildings, which means that such ventilator doesn’t have
N
the function of removing PM2.5. So the ventilator need to
cooperate with air cleaner. Comfort = ¦ wEn μ En ( pCO2 ) N (5)
1
Since the ventilator and air-cleaner are separated as On the other side, another controlling method is
independent systems, the smart gym system should resolve proposed based on real-time threshold judgment as to
the inconsistent between the “fresh air” and the “clean air” contrast with the fuzzy controlling method based on
especially in the hazy weather. human comfort level. Therefore, the ventilator switch
The ventilating rate of the ventilator can be expressed should be turned on if CO2 content is beyond the CO2
as rv. The intermittent working style of the ventilator will threshold. And the air-cleaner switch should be turned on
cooperate with the working of air-cleaner, which is aiming once PM2.5 content is higher than the PM2.5 threshold.
at reducing PM2.5 with Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) Both threshold values are determined based on the air
as ra-c. Assuming the air in the gym is the same with the quality standard as mentioned in Table I.
outdoor before the volunteers walking in. So the indoor
original value of PM2.5 hPM2.5_IN is same with the outdoor, V. EXERCISE EXPERIMENTS
hPM2.5_OUT.
Works as shown above have the primary efforts to
Then four air-cleaners will be kept working when the record the subjective feelings from the exercisers in the
ventilator is working and hPM2.5_IN is higher than the same environment with different energy states. However,
accepted health standard. The maximum capacity of the content of CO2 will directly influence human actions
volunteers N (N is based on the current number, in and out) while the tiny inhalable particulates usually cannot be
is 40 people at the same time. The exhalant CO2 will kept detected by human body. Therefore, it is necessary to keep
increase during the exercise time with CO2 exhale rate rex indoor PM2.5 and CO2 as lower as possible.
(with minimum value at rest rex_rest), which will be effected
Two kinds of working modes are proposed here to
by the exercise state En.
evaluate the working efficiencies of the ventilator and the
Then before the ventilator works, the monitored indoor air-cleaners, which are alternative working mode and
air quality (pCO2_IN & hPM2.5_IN) can be connected with the overlapping working mode. The ventilator and air-cleaners
working states of the air-cleaner and the motion states of are open alternately in the former mode based on the
the volunteers. evaluation of their efficiencies and the changes of air
compositions. While in the latter mode, the ventilator and
pCO2 _ IN = pCO2 _OUT + Nrex t Vgym air-cleaners can be open at the same moment as to the
°°
(
®rex = rex_rest ⋅ 1 + 1 (1 − wEn )) (3)
ultimate target for the better air quality.
°
°̄hPM2.5_IN = hPM2.5_OUT − 4ra-c ta − c Vgym A. Alternative Working Mode
Once the volunteers walk in the gym and begin doing
After a certain time, the indoor CO2 will be exercises, the indoor CO2 will increase continuously
accumulated to a level which need ventilator drawing less- especially when the exercise intensity increases. If there is
CO2 air from outside. none ventilator works, the CO2 content will increase to
0.699%, which is much higher than the standard value, as
shown in Fig.7.
100 0.4
50 0.2
0 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
Exercise time t (min)