Indoor air temperature control in buildings via an optimal tuned PI strategy

In this paper an optimal PI tuning strategy for the air temperature control embedded in a novel dynamic simulation code for the building energy performance analysis is presented. Precisely, the proportional and the integral gain of the controller are those that minimize a quadratic function of the temperature tracking error and the thermal sensible load. A numerical scheme for solving the resulting optimization problem is also presented. This code, written in MatLab, represents the kernel of an upgraded version of a building simulator proposed in the literature, called DETECt, in which several additional improvements have been also implemented. In order to assess the effectiveness of the proposed PI tuning method and the result temperature control, different case studies related to three reference buildings, with different geometries and envelope constructions, located in several European weather zones are considered.