Distributed Scheduling for Efficient HVAC Pre-Cooling Operations

Supply fan takes up to 30% of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems’ in-building energy consumption. Since the fan power consumption is a cube function of the mass flow rate of supply air, it is thus possible to reduce the energy consumption significantly by elongating and scheduling the pre-cooling processes. To handle the computational complexity raised for large scale buildings, two distributed consensus-like scheduling algorithms are proposed in this paper. Simulation studies indicate higher energy efficiency compared to uncoordinated pre-cooling processes; the computation is faster than centralized optimization, although with performance sacrifice.