# Distributed Temperature Control via Geothermal Heat Pump Systems in Energy Efficient Buildings

## TL;DR

This paper develops scalable, real-time distributed control algorithms for geothermal heat pump systems in multi-zone buildings, enhancing energy efficiency and user comfort without extensive measurements or predictions.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed control framework for multi-zone GHP systems that improves efficiency and scalability compared to traditional single-zone control schemes.

## Key findings

- Control algorithms effectively balance comfort and energy use.
- Distributed control does not require outdoor temperature predictions.
- Simulation confirms improved efficiency and ease of implementation.

## Abstract

Geothermal Heat Pump (GHP) systems are heating and cooling systems that use the ground as the temperature exchange medium. GHP systems are becoming more and more popular in recent years due to their high efficiency. Conventional control schemes of GHP systems are mainly designed for buildings with a single thermal zone. For large buildings with multiple thermal zones, those control schemes either lose efficiency or become costly to implement requiring a lot of real-time measurement, communication and computation. In this paper, we focus on developing energy efficient control schemes for GHP systems in buildings with multiple zones. We present a thermal dynamic model of a building equipped with a GHP system for floor heating/cooling and formulate the GHP system control problem as a resource allocation problem with the objective to maximize user comfort in different zones and to minimize the building energy consumption. We then propose real-time distributed algorithms to solve the control problem. Our distributed multi-zone control algorithms are scalable and do not need to measure or predict any exogenous disturbances such as the outdoor temperature and indoor heat gains. Thus, it is easy to implement them in practice. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes.