Distributed MPC for Thermal House Comfort with Shifting Loads and Limited Energy Resources

This paper presents a distributed predictive control methodology for indoor thermal comfort that optimizes the consumption of a limited shared energy resource using a demand-side management approach that involves a power price auction and shifting appliance loads. The control objective of each subsystem is to minimize the energy cost while maintaining the indoor temperature in range. In a distributed coordinated environment, the control uses multiple dynamically decoupled agents (one for each subsystem/house) aiming to achieve satisfaction of available energy coupling constraints. The system is simulated with several houses in a distributed environment.