Air ventilation is one of the top energy users in residential buildings. Smart ventilation equipment and controls help to reduce the amount of energy use attributable to ventilation in homes while maintaining high indoor air quality. Existing ventilation methods fail to take into account some of the most significant and commercially valuable outcomes of ventilation control, like changes in productivity and sick leave. Furthermore, existing approaches cannot adjust based on other important input signals and sources of information, like outdoor pollution levels or current electricity prices in a smart grid.

To overcome these deficiencies of existing systems, researchers at Drexel have now developed a system that shifts ventilation control from the building scale toward a cloud-based control that holistically considers ventilation's outcomes in terms of their real importance to end-users, and away from fixed minimum rates modified with ad-hoc energy-saving interventions. Simultaneously, optimizing in real-time based on physical process and valuation models takes advantage of dynamic weather, pollution, and occupancy processes and is expected to bring significant benefits in terms of energy savings and avoided pollution exposure, and also enables interaction with a smart electricity grid to allow ventilation to be responsibly used for demand-side load management.