Distributed Design of Sensor Fault-Tolerant Control for Preserving Comfortable Indoor Conditions in Buildings ^⁎

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme that can preserve thermal comfort conditions in a multi-zone building despite the presences of faulty temperature sensors. The proposed methodology exploits the networked structure of a Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) system controlling the temperature of physically interconnected zones in order to design a distributed FTC control scheme comprised of a set of dedicated control agents. For each control agent, two adaptive bounds on the tracking error are derived, taking into account: (i) healthy sensor measurements and (ii) a single sensor fault. Each adaptive bound constitutes a condition that allows the selection of an appropriate local control gain such that the thermal comfort conditions are satisfied. By utilizing the decisions of a sensor fault diagnosis scheme, the controller gain can be reconfigured to compensate the effects of sensor faults. The proposed methodology is illustrated by simulating a sensor fault in a 3-zone HVAC system.