A Novel Cyber-Physical System for the Optimal Heating-Cooling of Buildings

This paper presents a novel Cyber-Physical System (CPS) equipped with an advanced Distributed Model Predictive Control (DMPC) method with reduced order computational complexity, zero steady-state error, reduced start-up energy consumption and improved transient response for the optimal heating-cooling of buildings. The satisfactory application of this method for the optimal heating-cooling of a large-scale (6-story) building with 40 rooms is illustrated. Smart Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) - based thermostats, a gateway and a general Quadratic Programming (QP) solver are developed. Using this hardware set-up, the simulation results for the 6-story building are verified in a small scale by practical implementation. Note to Practitioners—This paper proposes a novel cyber-physical system for the optimal heating-cooling of large-scale buildings. The proposed system is practical, in particular, for large-scale buildings because for its realization, we do not need mighty and therefore expensive computer servers to execute required optimization problems in real-time. It also has high reliability and resilience due to its distributed computation nature and can be realized using available and cost-effective On-Off electric valves. To implement this system, a general QP solver, smart IIoT-based thermostats and a gateway are designed, developed and implemented in a building for the optimal heating and cooling. The satisfactory performance and superiority of the proposed system in terms of zero steady-state error, transient response, applicability for both heating and cooling systems and limited start-up energy consumption over the traditional as well as more advanced systems are illustrated by simulation and practical implementation.