Contaminant Event Monitoring in Intelligent Buildings Using a Multi-zone Formulation*

The dispersion of contaminants from sources (events) inside a building can compromise the indoor air quality and influence the occupants’ comfort, health, productivity and safety. These events could be the result of an accident, faulty equipment or a planned attack. Under these safety-critical conditions, immediate event detection should be guaranteed and the proper actions should be taken to ensure the safety of the people. In this paper, we consider an event as a fault in the process that disturbs the normal system operation. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the problem of monitoring the indoor air quality in intelligent buildings against the presence of contaminant sources fits the usual framework of fault detection, isolation, identification and accommodation. Specifically, we develop a multi-zone formulation using state space equations that enables the use of fault diagnosis and fault tolerant control techniques for monitoring contaminant events inside the building environment. We demonstrate our proposed formulation for the problem of isolating multiple contaminant sources using an estimation scheme in a nine zone building setting.