Co-zyBench

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems account for 40% to 50% of energy usage in commercial buildings, so controlling them while preserving occupants' comfort matters. State-of-the-art solutions use pervasive systems with sensors or smart devices to gauge individual thermal sensations, but assessing those methods is hard: real-world experiments are expensive, limited in access, and often overlook occupant and regional diversity.

Co-zyBench is a benchmark tool that takes a Digital Twin (DT) approach to evaluating personalized thermal comfort systems. It uses a co-simulation middleware interfacing between a DT of the smart building and its HVAC system and another DT representing occupants' dynamic thermal preferences across spaces. Those DTs are generated from information about the space being evaluated, including data captured by its sensors. Co-zyBench reports metrics for energy consumption, thermal comfort, and occupant equality, and ships reference DTs based on standard buildings, HVAC systems, and occupants with diverse thermal preferences.