Priority-based Energy Allocation in Buildings through Distributed Model Predictive Control

Many countries are facing energy shortage today and most of the global energy is consumed by HVAC systems in buildings. For the scenarios where the energy system is not sufficiently supplied to HVAC systems, a priority-based allocation scheme based on distributed model predictive control is proposed in this paper, which distributes the energy rationally based on priority order. According to the scenarios, two distributed allocation strategies, i.e., one-to-one priority strategy and multi-to-one priority strategy, are developed in this paper and validated by simulation in a building containing three zones and a building containing 36 rooms, respectively. Both priority-based strategies fully exploit the potential of predictive control solutions. The experiment shows that our scheme has good scalability and achieve the performance of centralized strategy while making the calculation tractable.