Design of nonlinear MPC techniques for Indoor Air Quality control

Indoor Air Quality control represents a crucial aspect in Home & Building Automation together with thermal comfort, lighting comfort and energy saving. The present paper proposes different MPC tuning strategies for Indoor Air Quality control in an office through natural ventilation, focusing on the impact of the prediction horizon. A reliable and flexible simulation framework is designed in order to straightly test and simulate the developed control strategies. Nonlinear Model Predictive Control is designed as control strategy. Carbon dioxide is selected as controlled variable that is characterized by an upper constraint. The manipulated variable is represented by the opening width of the office windows. Occupancy and wind speed are considered in the control systems’ formulation. The proposed controllers are tested and compared through simulation.