Decentralized fault-tolerant controller based on cooperative smart-wireless sensors in large-scale buildings

Abstract

The internet of things, based on smart-wireless sensor networks, is more and more used in buildings to monitor and improve their performance in terms of thermal comfort and power consumption. However, a detailed knowledge of the thermal and energy behaviour of the monitored smart building requires frequent use of these objects. Despite the advancement of current technologies today, these smart sensors or actuators are still prone to problems such as loss of communication or low battery. In the presence of this type of failures, we propose in this paper to generate virtual signals by the cooperation of faulty and non-faulty distributed sensors to optimize locally the performance of each heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system according to thermal comfort and energy-efficiency conditions. Thus, we design a decentralized cooperative fault-controller for internet of things networks to overcome this kind of problem and ensure optimal occupant comfort and energy consumption. We give some conditions to verify the feasibility of the technique and the stabilizability of this class of controllers. We then check its effectiveness by applying it to control the heating systems of a student residence located in the north of France.