Application of distributed model predictive approaches to temperature and CO₂ concentration control in buildings

In the context of energy consumption reduction, this paper focuses on the application of Model Predictive Control to occupants’ thermal comfort together with indoor air quality control while improving the whole building energy efficiency First, an open-space office split in three zones, located in Cork Institute of Technology, is modeled. A centralized MPC is designed to control the temperature and CO2 concentration in the three zones. Then, a distributed version of the MPC, with three separate local controllers, is considered. Finally, simulation results show that the distributed MPC solution achieves control performance quite close to the centralized version with less computing effort.