Multi-zone temperature modeling and control

In this chapter, we now address modeling and control for multi-zone and building-level temperature regulation. Many commercial and residential buildings have multiple independent zones requiring space conditioning. These zones may be uniform in size or may have a significant size distribution. Moreover, the space conditioning requirements may be quite disparate depending on the zone usage. This chapter provides an overview of multi-zone temperature control within buildings. We review modeling approaches for building zones and their interconnections. The primary modeling framework is a resistor–capacitor framework where thermal energy is stored in a zone in a capacitive sense and transferred between zones of different temperature through a thermally resistive path. The zones are fed by a cooling or heating system that could be liquid or air. Subsequently, we focus attention on control of multi-zone systems starting with an appropriate architecture for their representation. We present particular structures for energy flow that naturally decompose the dynamic properties of the building into hierarchical structures. These structures can then be used to create controllers or either a centralized or distributed variety. Simulations serve to illustrate the concepts and represent the results for both the modeling and dynamic control.