Distributed MPC for Green Thermally Comfortable Buildings Based on an Electro-thermal Modular Approach

The aim of the paper is to present a demand-side management approach that uses a distributed model-based predictive controller to provide indoor thermal comfort in buildings with a limited green energy resource. The overall system predicts the indoor environmental conditions for buildings with different plans that are modeled using an electro-thermal modular scheme. For control purposes, this modular scheme allows an easy modeling of buildings with different plans where adjacent areas can thermally interact. The control system selects the most appropriate actions to satisfy the comfort and power constraints. In a distributed coordinated environment, the control uses multiple dynamically coupled agents (one for each subsystem/zone/house) aiming to achieve satisfaction of available energy coupling constraints. The distributed environment is simulated with two houses with different plans, one house with two divisions and the other with one. The results validate the proposed methodology in terms of both thermal comfort and energy savings.