Control of HVAC Systems in Sweden: Current Status and Future Directions

Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are used to maintain desired indoor comfort levels in the built environment against the effects of disturbances such as weather conditions and internal loads. Since these disturbances are in general predictable and buildings have thermal mass, implementing model predictive control strategies can lead to energyand cost-efficiency. The automatic control group at KTH has developed novel HVAC control techniques and an advanced HVAC testbed where experimentally to test and evaluate innovative control strategies. The control approach proposed in the KTH HVAC testbed is stochastic and predictive, aiming to account for the intrinsically probabilistic nature of the comfort levels constraints of environments conditioning problems. This gained knowledge is now constituting a preliminary step from which it is possible to expand the research efforts to other air conditioning domains, specially datacenters. In this abstract we describe the current work in the KTH HVAC testbed and outline the future research directions.