Modeling and identification of a large multi-zone office building

Predictive control in buildings has undergone an intensive research in the past years. Model identification plays a central role in a predictive control approach. This paper presents a comprehensive study of modeling of a large multi-zone office building. Many of the common methods used for modeling of the buildings, such as a detailed modeling of the physical properties, RC modeling, etc., appeared to be unfeasible because of the complexity of the problem. Moreover, most of the research papers dealing with this topic presents identification (and control) of either a single-zone building, or a single building sub-system. On contrary, we proposed a novel approach combining a detailed modeling by a building-design software with a black-box subspace identification. The uniqueness of the presented approach is not only in the size of the problem, but also in the way of getting the model and interconnecting several computational and simulation tools.