Predictive Control of a Complex District Heating Network

Abstract

The short term optimization and control of district heating networks is of great interest for Energy Industries because of the technical, economical and environmental benefits which could be earned from an appropriate management. However, models of such complicated systems are strongly non linear and suffer from important uncertainties. In this article, models well suited to industrial issues are first designed. The whole technological string production - distribution - consumption is taken into account. The aim of this study is then to compute an optimal and robust control law for the network. Because of the errors in consumers' demand prediction and modelling uncertainties, a closed loop strategy has to be used to compute a robust control law for the district heating network. In this paper, a robust predictive control strategy of the network is thus developed. The method has been successfully tested on a benchmark network created by EDF ('Electricite de France') and some results are presented here.