Energy Management in Intelligent Buildings using Predictive Control

This paper develops an operational control platform for intelligent buildings using a SCADA system (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition). This SCADA system integrates different types of information coming from the several technologies present in modern buildings (control of ventilation, temperature, illumination, etc.).The developed control strategy implements an hierarchical cascade controller where inner loops are performed by local PLCs (Programmable Logic Controller), and the outer loop is managed by the centralized SCADA system, which interacts with the entire local PLC network.In this paper a Predictive Controller is implemented at the centralized SCADA platform. Tests applied to the control of temperature and luminosity in huge-area rooms are presented. The developed Predictive Controller tries to optimize the satisfaction of user explicit preferences coming from several distributed user-interfaces, subjected to the constraints of energy waste minimization.In order to run the Predictive Controller at the SCADA platform a communication channel was developed to allow communication between the SCADA application and the MATLAB application where the Predictive Controller runs.