Use of model predictive control and weather forecasts for energy efficient building climate control

This paper presents an investigation of how ModelPredictiveControl (MPC) and weatherpredictions can increase the energy efficiency in Integrated Room Automation (IRA) while respecting occupant comfort. IRA deals with the simultaneous control of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) as well as blind positioning and electric lighting of a building zone such that the room temperature as well as CO2 and luminance levels stay within given comfort ranges. MPC is an advanced control technique which, when applied to buildings, employs a model of the building dynamics and solves an optimization problem to determine the optimal control inputs. In this paper it is reported on the development and analysis of a Stochastic ModelPredictiveControl (SMPC) strategy for buildingclimatecontrol that takes into account the uncertainty due to the use of weatherpredictions. As first step the potential of MPC was assessed by means of a large-scale factorial simulation study that considered different types of buildings and HVAC systems at four representative European sites. Then for selected representative cases the control performance of SMPC, the impact of the accuracy of weatherpredictions, as well as the tunability of SMPC were investigated. The findings suggest that SMPC outperforms current control practice.