Convergence Rate of Model Reference Adaptive Control with Application to Building HVAC Systems

Model reference adaptive control (MRAC) has been studied for decades and successfully applied in multiple areas, including heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems for buildings. MRAC is efficient in capturing the time-varying characteristics of buildings' indoor temperatures and outdoor weather environments. In this paper, the rate of convergence of MRAC is investigated, where a direct adaptive control with temperature set point reference tracking is used to regulate the indoor temperatures for buildings. Numerical results show that by controlling the HVAC systems of residential buildings using MRAC, the indoor temperatures converge Q-sublinearly to the desired temperature set points. In addition, the rate of convergence for MRAC is compared with a baseline adaptive model-free control method.