Towards Autonomous Synthesis of Building Substation Control Loops

• Published in: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm)
• Main Authors: Birk, Wolfgang, Atta, Khalid
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: Luleå tekniska universitet, Signaler och system 2016
• Subjects: district heating; substation control; performance assessment; auto-tuning; temperature control; tap water control; Control Engineering; Reglerteknik; Luleå
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-61242; https://doi.org/10.1109/SmartGridComm.2016.7778735

The main contribution of this paper is to study the feasibility of an automated approach to the assessment and synthesis of control loops in substations of a district heating and cooling system. The low-level controllers in substation are usually PID-type controllers and can not easily be changed. Moreover, the tuning of these controllers is often done in an ad-hoc manner and remains in the initial tuning despite changes in the substation over their operational life. Consequently, insufficient control performance due to false tuning can be misinterpreted as a hardware issue and lead to unnecessary replacement of parts. In order to solve this problem, the paper proposes an approach to assess the control loop performance based on logged data from substations, and to subsequently tune the current substation controllers, when no hardware issues are detected. The approach is applied to a well-known building substation model in simulation, which indicates that the approach is feasible. Analysis of acquired data from a number of substations in the DHC system of Luleå Energi AB, provides evidence for the problem and how the approach can be applied in its future implementation. Moreover, a number of challenges and future work are indicated.