# Distributed Temperature Control via Geothermal Heat Pump Systems in Energy Efficient Buildings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08819 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08819/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Optimal Management of Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings via Safe Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08132/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Geothermal Heat Pump (GHP) systems are heating and cooling systems that use the ground as the temperature exchange medium. GHP systems are becoming more and more popular in recent years due to their high efficiency. Conventional control schemes of GHP systems are mainly designed for buildings with a single thermal zone. For large buildings with multiple thermal zones, those control schemes either lose efficiency or become costly to implement requiring a lot of real-time measurement, communication and computation. In this paper, we focus on developing energy efficient control schemes for GHP systems in buildings with multiple zones. We present a thermal dynamic model of a building equipped with a GHP system for floor heating/cooling and formulate the GHP system control problem as a resource allocation problem with the objective to maximize user comfort in different zones and to minimize the building energy consumption. We then propose real-time distributed algorithms to solve the control problem. Our distributed multi-zone control algorithms are scalable and do not need to measure or predict any exogenous disturbances such as the outdoor temperature and indoor heat gains. Thus, it is easy to implement them in practice. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes.