Building temperature distributed control via explicit MPC and “Trim and Respond” methods

We study the distributed control of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in buildings. We present and compare two control design techniques. In the first part, a one-step distributed model predictive controller (DMPC) is introduced. We compute the explicit state-feedback solution and show how to implement it on existing networked buildings control platforms. In the second part, we discuss a control logic currently used in the buildings industry called “Trim and Respond”. We show that “Trim and Respond” controllers can be seen as a special class of one-step DMPC algorithms. We conclude the paper with a simulation study which shows the DMPC control design and its equivalence with “Trim and Respond” heuristics.