Power peak shaving with data transmission delays for thermal management in smart buildings

This paper presents a scheme aimed at mitigating the influence of random data transmission delays in networked thermal appliance control systems in smart buildings. The impact of this type of delays is first analyzed, and it is proposed to utilize loose timing synchronization and add blank gaps between the consecutive appliance operations to avoid the possible violation of the given power budget. A cooperative control of thermal appliance operation is developed using a networked Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based controller to deal with delays. It is also shown that the schedulability of such a control scheme can be assessed online. The performance of the proposed control scheme is assessed by a simulation study based on the thermal dynamics of an eight-room office building. The obtained results show that the proposed solution can achieve an efficient power peaks shaving in the presence of random network delays.