Nonlinear model predictive control for energy efficient housing with modern construction materials

The reduction of energy consumption in residential buildings and houses represents a major societal and environmental challenge. A huge portion of energy consumption in houses and buildings goes towards comfort control - heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Modern architecture tackles these problems by considering (i) passive exploitation of solar energy and (ii) use of special construction materials that often have quite complex characteristics. Therefore, a smart energy management control system should be able to take both of these considerations into account. This paper proposes a model predictive control (MPC) strategy for energy efficient management of heating and cooling of a house that can cope with the nonlinearities in the system induced by the use of modern construction materials. Furthermore, the proposed controller takes into account the weather forecast information, in particular the prediction of solar irradiance and air temperature. The nonlinear behavior of the system is approximated by a piecewise affine model and further incorporated into the mixed logical dynamical framework. The performance of the proposed nonlinear MPC is demonstrated in simulation experiments, which show applicability and usefulness of the MPC algorithm for energy management.