Flexibility characterization of multi-zone buildings via distributed optimization

Ahstract- We consider the flexibility in power consumption of multi-zone buildings. The objective is to characterize the minimum and the maximum power consumption without compromising the thermal comfort of zones and the operational conditions of air-handling units. A centralized approach, which collects massive data from all zones, requires significant computational resources, therefore does not scale well for multi-zone buildings. We show that the thermal dynamics are separable over zones except for the supply air and the total airflow rate from air-handling units. By casting the agreement of supply air temperature as a consensus constraint over zones, and by casting the total airflow rate as a sharing constraint, we show that the flexibility problem is amenable to distribution control. We develop a distributed algorithm that can be implemented in parallel. The computational time scales gracefully with the number of zones. For a building with 300 zones over 24 hour period, it takes less than 15 minutes to find the solution on a personal computer.

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