Distributed control of multi-zone commercial buildings for demand response

The Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system in commercial buildings usually consume a significant amount of energy. Therefore, it is essential to take some measures to make HVAC system operate in a more energy-efficient way. This paper employs a Resistance-Capacitance (RC) model for each zone in a multi-zone commercial building. An optimization problem is formulated to reduce the sum of zone temperature deviations and building power consumption tracking error. This paper puts forward a distributed control strategy using HVAC system in a typical multi-zone building for demand response. The proposed approach combines the advantages of balanced user comfort and energy demand reference following. In addition, to accommodate the power fluctuation issue caused by the time-varying supply-demand changes in power grid, a High-Pass-Filter (HPF) is adopted to smooth the power fluctuations, as well as providing a stabilization effect to some extent. Simulation results certificate the effectiveness of the advanced distributed control strategy.