Distributed Sensor Fault Accommodation of Multi-Zone HVAC Systems

This paper presents a distributed methodology for controlling multi-zone Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems and a fault accommodation scheme for reconfiguring the distributed controller in the presence of unknown sensor faults. The multi-zone HVAC system is modelled as a network of interconnected subsystems representing the temperature dynamics of the storage tank and the various building zones. The distributed control scheme for each subsystem is based on local measurements, as well as measurements from neighboring subsystems. In the presence of a sensor fault, an accommodation scheme is designed by adaptively estimating and compensating the effect of the sensor fault. The estimation of the local sensor fault is exploited not only by the local but also by neighboring controllers to reduce fault propagation effects resulting from the distributed control architecture. Under certain conditions, the closed-loop stability of the multi-zone HVAC system is analyzed in the presence of modeling uncertainty and measurement noise, under both healthy conditions and faulty sensor measurements. Simulation results are used to illustrate the proposed distributed sensor fault accommodation scheme.© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. P. M. Papadopoulos, V. Reppa, M. M. Polycarpou and C. G. Panayiotou, "Distributed Sensor Fault Accommodation of Multi-Zone HVAC Systems," in Proceedings of IEEE Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 7296-7301, 2018. doi:10.1109/CDC.2018.8619178 This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 739551 (KIOS CoE)