APPLICATION OF PREDICTIVE CONTROL IN DISTRICT BEATING SYSTEMS

In district heating systems, and in particular if the heat production cakes place at a combined heat and power (CHP) plant, a reasonable con trol strategy is to keep the supply temperature from the district heat ing plant as low as possible. However, the control is subject to some restrictions, for example, that the total heat requirement for all con sumers is supplied at any time and each individual consumer is guarant eed some minimum supply temperature at any time. A lower supply temper ature implies lower heat loss from the transport and the distribution network, and lower production costs. A district heating system is an e xample of a non-stationary system, and the model parameters have to be time varying. Hence, the classical predictive control theory has to b e modified. Simulation experiments are performed in order to study the performance of modified predictive controllers. The systems ape, howe ver, described by transfer function models identified from real data.