Design of model based LQG control for integrated building systems

The automation of the operation of integrated building systems requires using modern control techniques to enhance the quality of the building indoor environments. This paper describes the theatrical base and practical application of an optimal dynamic regulator using modelbased Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control design for integrated building systems. This LQG regulator consists of an optimal state-feedback controller and an optimal state estimator. In this case, a performance criterion is minimized in order to maintain the indoor temperature of the building comfortable within a minimum energy consumption. Besides this regulation performance, a Kalman filter (KF) is used to minimize the asymptotic covariance of the estimation error when those building systems are encountered with disturbances. Particularly, this paper is concerned with the relevance and reliability of integrating control and building performance simulation environments by run-time coupling, over TCP/IP protocol suite. In addition, this paper involves a case-study with two important steps; the first step consists of experiments obtained in a test-cell that demonstrate the potential ability of advanced control strategies in buildings, and then simulation results are obtained with the use of distributed control and building performance simulation software by run-time coupling.