An event-driven multi-agent based distributed optimal control strategy for HVAC systems in IoT-enabled smart buildings

Abstract

Smart buildings generally adopt a centralized optimal control for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to improve the building system performance. As a crucial technology adopted in smart buildings, Internet of Things (IoT) based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are promising platforms for implementing novel distributed optimal control to achieve distributed intelligence effectively. Such a future mist computing paradigm can be hindered by the limited energy resource of WSNs. The event-driven optimization method activates the optimization only when events occur. It can save the energy resource of WSNs, and thus pave the way for implementing the distributed optimal control architecture in IoT-based WSNs. This study therefore proposes an event-driven multi-agent based distributed optimal control strategy for HVAC systems for implementation in IoT-based battery-powered WSNs. The strategy consists of two novel schemes. First, an event determination scheme determines the event threshold by comprehensively considering the system performance and the total energy consumption of individual sensors implementing the distributed optimal control architecture. Second, an event-driven distributed optimization scheme solves the optimization problems with distributed optimization algorithms in IoT sensors of limited data processing capacity when an event occurs. Comparison and case studies are conducted to compare different strategies and validate the proposed strategy. Results show that different strategies require very different sensor energy consumption. The proposed strategy can provide satisfactory system performance while reducing the energy consumption of IoT sensors.