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The decision making of a suitable heating, ventilating and air conditioning system's set-point temperature is an energy and environmental challenge in our society. In the present paper, a general framework to define such temperature based on a dynamic adaptive comfort algorithm is proposed. Due to the fact that the thermal comfort of the occupants of a building has different ranges of acceptability, this method is applied to learn such comfort temperature with respect to the running mean temperature and therefore to decide the suitable range of indoor temperature. It is demonstrated that this solution allows to dynamically build an adaptive comfort algorithm, an algorithm based on the human being's thermal adaptability, without applying the traditional theory. The proposed methodology based on the K-Nearest-Neighbour algorithm was tested and compared with data from an experimental thermal comfort field study carried out in a mixed mode building in the south-western area of Spain and with the Support Vector Machine method. The results show that K-Nearest-Neighbour algorithm represents the pattern of thermal comfort data better than the traditional solution and that it is a suitable method to learn the thermal comfort area of a building and to define the set-point temperature for a heating, ventilating and air-conditioning system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the launch of an Internet database, called the SCImago Journal & Country Rank database, allowing users to generate on-the-fly citation statistics of published research papers for free. The open-access database calculates papers' impact factors using an algorithm. It is collaborating with Amsterdam-based science publisher Elsevier. SCImago is a data-mining and visualization group in Spain. The company ranks journals and countries using citation metrics as the popular Hirsch Index. It also includes the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).