Resource Allocation Strategies for Multizone Temperature Control

Resource allocation, a problem of increasing importance in control theory (Murray, 2003), involves splitting some quantity and dedicating appropriate proportions of it to optimize some quantity of interest. In “dynamic resource allocation,” allocations are inputs to dynamical system and its response determines the quality of the allocation. For this, feedback information is typically used to repeatedly reallocate resources so that a performance measure is maximized. In this paper we introduce an inexpensive multizone temperature control experiment (i.e., appropriate for a university laboratory) that is designed to study the development and evaluation of dynamic resource allocation strategies. Experimental data is shown to illustrate the challenges of the experiment and how a variety of resource allocation strategies behave in implementation. Copyright c ©2004 IFAC