Heating System Control in Commercial Buildings with Peak Demand Adjustment

Wojciech Grega Piotr Bania Department of Automatics, AGH University of Science and Technology, 30-059 Kraków, Al. Mickiewicza 30, Poland [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper deals with a supervisory control strategy which enables to optimize heat energy distribution between buildings with discontinuous operation. The core principle of the energy saving algorithm is based on lowering the night-time temperature and increasing (preheating) it in the morning. One important problem of this strategy consists in keeping peak demand of energy below the maximum power of the central energy source. This requires a proper structure and proper settings of the local control algorithms. A model-reference nonlinear predictive control algorithm is studied and the effects of peak power demand reduction are compared with a linear control method.