  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.
