Distributed adaptive sensor fault tolerant control for smart buildings

This paper presents a model-based distributed fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme with emphasis on compensating the effects of sensor faults in multi-zone heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. A bank of local adaptive FTC agents are designed to accommodate possible sensor faults in HVAC systems, modeled as a set of interconnected, nonlinear subsystems. In order to compensate the fault effects that may propagate in the neighboring subsystems, each local FTC utilizes the information generated by a local monitoring agent that diagnoses the sensor faults and performs an adaptive estimation of the isolated sensor faults. The local monitoring and control agents are allowed to exchange information with neighboring agents. Simulation results are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology applied to a seven-zone HVAC system.