Authors:
Farah Gabsi
1
;
Frederic Hamelin
2
;
Nathalie Sauer
3
and
Joseph J. Yame
2
Affiliations:
1
Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy, University of Lorraine, Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France, Laboratoire de Génie Informatique, de Production et de Maintenance, University of Lorraine, Metz, France
;
2
Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy, University of Lorraine, Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France
;
3
Laboratoire de Génie Informatique, de Production et de Maintenance, University of Lorraine, Metz, France
Keyword(s):
Energy-efficient Buildings, Model Predictive Control, Regularization.
Abstract:
This paper presents a new thermal regulation technique for multizone buildings, possibly equipped with discontinuously
(on/off) operating HVAC actuators, based on regularized economic model predictive control
(REMPC). In the presence of actuators operating on an on/off basis, it often happens that the control scenario
resulting from such a strategy is very “aggressive” towards these same actuators due to the many on/off cycles.
This phenomenon can lead to premature wear of the actuators most sensitive to these repeated state changes
(especially heat pump compressors). In order to take into account the “aggressiveness” of a control scenario
and to increase the lifetime of the actuators, an economic criterion with a regularization term based on the
parsimony-promoting property of the ℓε-norm (ε small) is used. This term is sufficiently generic to allow the
regularization of the optimal control law by taking into account discontinuous control inputs (on/off), reducing
the numbe
r of actuators used at any given time or avoiding inappropriate control scenarios (alternating use of
heat pump in heating/cooling modes,...). To solve the minimization problem of the non-convex ℓε-regularized
economic criterion, we use an iterative algorithm recently derived in (Gabsi et al., 2018b). The effectiveness
of the proposed control strategy is illustrated on the “Eco-Safe” platform at CRAN Nancy, France.
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