Model predictive control of a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system

The largest energy consuming subsystem in a building is heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system. It is thus essential to optimize the behavior of that subsystem in order to achieve energy savings. In this work focus is on efficient energy usage in a sample zone system consisting of two coupled zones. Ventilation, heating and cooling are done by air handling unit (AHU) and variable air volume (VAV) boxes. Optimization of the system means finding optimal control sequences for AHU and VAV boxes. The model of the coupled zones is linear, while the models of the AHU and VAV boxes are nonlinear. In order to find a suboptimal solution, which will keep zone temperature in given boundaries, while handling ventilation requirements, linear programming and linear zone system model are used to find appropriate cooling/heating powers, and then those powers are used to obtain control sequence for AHU and VAV boxes.