Distributed Temperature Regulator Design for an Air Conditioning System

In this paper, we propose a design method of distributed temperature regulators for an air conditioning system, which is modeled as a network system composed of second-order subsystems representing the dynamics of air conditioners and thermal diffusion among areas. In the proposed method, to make a distributed regulator design problem tractable, we consider confining the class of distributed controllers to that consisting of second-order subcontrollers, whose network structure is made identical to that of the controlled system. On the basis of this specialization, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition of stabilizing controller parameters. Furthermore, we show that the problem of distributed regulator design can be reduced to a problem of robust state feedback gain design, formulated as guaranteeing a control specification in terms of the H2- and H∞-norm. The efficiency of our distributed regulator design method is shown through a couple of numerical simulations.