Heat Pump Management for Building’s Indoor Temperature Control

In the present paper, an Advanced Process Control system for the optimized management of the heat pump power in a building is proposed. The considered process is characterized by four rooms and each room is equipped with a fan coil. A linear model of the process is derived through suitable identification procedures, considering the heat pump power and the outdoor temperature as Manipulated Variable and measured Input Disturbance Variable, respectively. The output of the model is represented by the temperature of each single room. A tailored formulation for the computation of an adaptive average temperature is proposed that takes into account users’ preferences and eventual detection of bad measurements. A Model Predictive Control strategy based on the formulated models represents the core of the Advanced Process Control system; the proposed controller aims to respect the imposed lower constraint on the rooms’ average temperature while ensuring heat pump power minimization when allowed. The proposed control system is tested on significant scenarios.