Poster: Symbolic Control of Monotone Systems Application to Ventilation Regulation in Buildings

We describe an application of symbolic control to ventilation regulation in buildings. The monotonicity property of a nonlinear control system subject to disturbances, modeling the process, is exploited to obtain symbolic abstractions, in the sense of alternating simulation. The resulting abstractions consist of non-deterministic finite transition systems, for which we can synthesize supervisory safety controllers to keep the room temperatures within prescribed bounds. To choose among possible control inputs preserving safety, we consider the problem of minimizing a given cost function and apply a receding horizon control scheme. The approach has been applied to temperature regulation on a small-scale building equipped with underfloor air distribution (UFAD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of experimental implementation of symbolic controllers.