由张子杨、张春路（通讯作者）、肖赋（香港理工大学）合作撰写的论文Energy-efficient decentralized control method with enhanced robustness for multi-evaporator air conditioning systems在Applied Energy 2020年第279卷在线发表。论文针对多联机空调系统，提出了一种效率更高的分散控制方法，可以实现最大8.6%的系统能效提升。并且提出了一种基于EOTF的PI控制器，可以获得比模型预测控制更好的鲁棒性。

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论文摘要：

Multi-evaporator air conditioning system has found increasing applications in buildings. Energy-efficient control for this kind of system presents significant challenge because of strong coupling effects and various operation modes. Existing control methods are most likely to encounter uncontrollable problems and lack robustness under uncertain operation conditions. This paper proposes an energy-efficient decentralized control method with enhanced robustness for multi-evaporator air conditioning system. The proposed method is featured by a self-optimizing control strategy and a decentralized proportional-integral (PI) control algorithm based on the effective open-loop transfer function (EOTF). Different from most of previous studies that regulated compressor speed to control the evaporating pressure by using a supervisory optimizer, the proposed self-optimizing control strategy regulates compressor speed to maintain constant suction superheat and achieves energy-efficient operation in a simple and robust manner. Meanwhile, the EOTF-based decentralized PI algorithm overcomes the weakness of decentralized controllers in dealing with coupling effects, while retaining robustness against model errors and component faults. Control performance of the proposed method is tested using a validated system dynamic model. Through extensive controllability tests, it is found that the proposed control method significantly improves temperature control performance of the conventional strategy. Up to 8.6% energy savings are achieved with the proposed control strategy. Moreover, the proposed EOTF-based PI controller demonstrates enhanced robustness in comparison with an advanced model predictive controller.