A distributed framework for contaminant event detection and isolation in multi-zone intelligent buildings

Abstract

An intelligent building is required to provide safety to its occupants against any possible threat that may affect the indoor air quality, such as accidental or malicious airborne contaminant release in the building interior. In this work, we design a distributed methodology for detecting and isolating multiple contaminant events in a large-scale building. Specifically, we consider the building as a collection of interconnected subsystems and we design a contaminant event monitoring agent for each subsystem. Each monitoring agent aims to detect the contamination of the underlying subsystem and isolate the zone where the contaminant source is located, while it is allowed to exchange information with its neighboring agents. The decision logic implemented in the contaminant event monitoring agent is based on the generation of observer-based residuals and adaptive thresholds. We demonstrate our proposed formulation using a 14-zone building case study.