Model predictive control for energy management in buildings Part 1: Zone Model Predictive Control

In this paper, a distributed model predictive control is proposed to manage the whole set of actuators (heating/cooling, ventilation, lighting, shading) in a multi-zone building to control comfort parameters (temperature, indoor CO2 level and indoor illuminance). The control process is performed in a distributed fashion and handles variable prices as well as resource limitation in a context of a multi energy source building. To this end, we firstly present a zonal nonlinear model predictive controller which is concerned by zonal decision making -part 1 of the paper-.We then provide a coordination scheme based on a primal decomposition to address the resource allocation problem which occurs in the presence of global constraints on power consumption and/or global shared storage capability in the building -part 2 of the paper-Lamoudi et al. [2012]. We finally provide some simulation results attesting the fast convergence of control algorithm and the benefit of the controller.