Real-Time Infinite Horizon Adaptive/Predictive Control for Smart Home HVAC Applications

The potential benefits that adaptive and predictive control schemes can bring to building environment control applications such as HVAC have been well documented in recent years. One significant drawback of these schemes is that in many cases they require large computational burdens, especially in adaptive situations and when constraints are present. A secondary drawback is the large number of parameters that have to be potentially tuned. As high-bandwidth real-time embedded computing platforms and advanced levels of control knowledge may not be realistic expectations for many users, the applicability of advanced schemes is currently limited for most Smart home applications. In this paper, a prototype infinite-horizon 'plug-and-play' adaptive MPC scheme is presented for input-constrained HVAC applications. The scheme has been optimized for real-time implementation on small, low-cost embedded processors and requires little user preconfiguration. Preliminary hardware-in-the-loop based experimental results indicate good performance of the technique coupled with extremely low overheads.