A Model Predictive Control strategy for energy saving and user comfort features in building automation

Home & Building Automation provides automatic control of indoor environments and its primary goals are the fulfillment of user requirements while realizing significant energy savings. In the present paper, energy saving in home and office buildings is achieved through an efficient management of heat and lighting devices and with the exploitation of renewable resources, like sun (thermal and light energy) that takes into account user comfort. The presence of coupling effects between the thermal and illuminance systems (mainly in shutter actuation) that often calls for contrasting requests in terms of actuators control actions, adds difficulties to the controller design if approached with standard control methods. An improvement of a previous control system is performed by the authors by adopting Model Predictive Control techniques. The proposed system integrates energy-consuming sources for heat and light power supply, with green energy-supplying sources. To handle the nonlinearities a switching approach has been adopted in developing the Model Predictive Controller, which is based on a bank of models dependent on thermal and light solar radiation. The proposed solution allows obtaining satisfactory performances in terms of regulation and energy efficiency; in addition, exploiting green energy-supplying sources, a sensible reduction of energy consumption is achieved.