A predictive control approach for thermal energy management in buildings

Building equipment accounts for almost 40% of total global energy consumption. More than half of which is used by active systems, such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. These latter are responsible for the occupants’ well-being and considered among the main consumers of electricity in buildings. In order to improve both occupants’ comfort and energy efficiency in buildings, optimal control oriented models, such as Model Predictive Control (MPC), have proven to be promising techniques for developing intelligent control strategies for building energy management systems. This paper presents a real-time predictive control approach of an air conditioning (AC) system for thermal regulation in a single-zone building using MPC control framework. The proposed approach takes into account the physical parameters of the building, weather predictions (i.e. ambient temperature and solar radiation) and time-varying thermal comfort constraints to maintain optimal energy consumption of the AC while enhancing occupants’ comfort. For this purpose, a control-oriented thermal model for a room integrated with AC system is first developed using physics-based (white box) technique and then used to design and develop the MPC controller model. A numerical case study has been investigated and simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in reducing the energy consumption by about 68% while providing a significant indoor thermal improvement. A conventional On–Off controller was used as a baseline reference to evaluate the system performance against the proposed approach