Event-triggered distributed model predictive control scheme for temperature regulation in multi-zone air conditioning systems with improved indoor thermal preference indicator

摘要

Driven by the increasing needs in multi-zone buildings for reducing the air conditioning (A/C) system related energy consumption and increasing the occupants' thermal comfort, an event-triggered distributed model predictive control (DMPC) scheme for building temperature regulation with improved indoor thermal preference indicator is proposed. To this end, a temperature-energy model of the A/C system in a zone which considers multiple types of heat transfer, and the system model of the multi-zone A/C system are derived first. On this basis, an improved indoor thermal preference indicator that trades off the A/C systems related energy consumption with the aggregate thermal comfort of the occupants is proposed for the multi-zone A/C system, then the optimal indoor temperature set-points for each zone are determined by using the distributed consensus algorithm. It is followed by an event-triggered DMPC scheme by adjusting the A/C systems to arrive at the optimal indoor temperature set-points for all the zones with lower communication and computation load. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed methods are demonstrated through a case study on an actual multi-zone A/C system.

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