Zone-level agreement by consensus for building thermal energy management

The paper addresses the problem of distributed agreement for control of building thermal energy through a class of consensus algorithms. The context of the work is defined by the emergence of dense networked measurement and control systems and the cyberphysical paradigm in real world building energy management applications. This has occurred more saliently by means of wireless sensor network systems, offering integration of sensing, computing and actuation capabilities. Key point is mitigation of current model- and occupancy-based strategies in order to increase building energy efficiency under a unifying framework. We consider both convergence and convergence speed conditions and relate our approach to the state-of-the-art. Simulation results are presented on a reference multiple thermal zone model.