Robust nonlinear HVAC systems control with evolutionary optimisation

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to design a robust high-performance nonlinear multi-input multi-output heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system controller for temperature and relative humidity regulation. Buildings are complex systems which are subjected to many unknown disturbances. Further complicating the control problem is the fact that, in practice, buildings and their systems have static nonlinearities such as power saturation that make stability difficult to guarantee. Therefore, in order to overcome these issues, a control system must be designed to be robust (performance insensitive) against uncertainties, static nonlinearities and effectively respond to unknown heat load and moisture disturbances. Design/methodology/approach – A state of the art nonlinear inverse dynamics (NID) technique is combined with a genetic algorithm (GA) optimisation scheme in order to improve robustness against uncertainty in the system's modelling assumptions. The parameter uncertainty problem ...

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