Fault-Tolerant Economic Model Predictive Control for Building Temperature Regulation using $\ell_{\varepsilon}$ -Regularization

This paper presents an active Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) scheme for the temperature regulation of buildings subject to actuator faults. An optimal control strategy based on a regularized predictive economic criterion is proposed to determine the remedial actions to be taken when actuator faults are diagnosed. These corrective actions can be used either to generate a less “aggressive” control scenario by minimizing the number of on/off cycles of the faulty actuator or to reduce the number of actuators used at any time. One of the interests of this strategy is to prevent simple faults from developing into serious failures for actuators particularly vulnerable to repeated on/off cycles (in particular heat pump compressors). To account for the “aggressiveness” of a control scenario, the penalty term associated with the regularized economic criterion is defined using the parsimony property of ℓ _ε -norm (ε small).