Abstract—This paper presents a home automation plant, consisting of a distributed heating system. It is a system implemented on a residential home, however it could be extended and used for other buildings as well. The paper presents the distributed heating system’s structure, extended from a classical heating system, and the authors also describe the equipment used for the designing and implementation of such a system. The way the system works is depicted, and the authors enfold all the benefits of using such a distributed heating system, such as, increasing the user’s thermal comfort on different living areas and reducing the costs of thermal heating. Index Terms—Home automation, distributed heating system, thermal heating, thermal comfort, central heating unit. I. INTRODUCTION Home automation is a topical field, covering all utilities and domestic uses, to ensure, among others, high level of comfort with minimum costs to the end user, arising from the use of intelligence and communications in consumer products. The field of household thermal heating is important from the point of view of ensuring constant thermal comfort, with minimum consumption of thermal energy or electricity [1], [2]. Residential heating, indispensable in life due to seasonal change [3], presents high potential in diminishing domestic energy consumption [1], [4]. In order to minimize the costs of thermal heating during the cold seasons, users take different actions as such as restricting the use of heating to a small number of rooms, thus giving up thermal comfort in favor of costs [1], [5]. Moreover, heating practices varies significantly not only within houses but also between them [6]. In such cases, home automation comes in handy, since in the European Union (EU), households consume a quarter of all energy consumption [7]. At present, part of the household heating uses the centralized method, indoor temperature comes from the efference of hot water to houses by heating pipelines, resulting in uneven temperatures, thus, more and more people are using individual household heating systems [3]. This means, one heating unit and one heating system exists for temperature control of the entire household. This paper presents a two-way distributed heating system for homes, that uses only one heat source and control block, incorporated in the Central Heating Unit (CHU), to control the heating process for both heating delivery systems, thus Manuscript received April 28, 2020; revised December 23, 2020. Iulia Clitan, Vlad Muresan, Mihail Abrudean are with the Automation Department, Technical University of Cuj-Napoca, Romania (e-mail: iulia.inoan@aut.utcluj.ro, vlad.muresan@aut.utcluj.ro, mihai.abrudean@aut.utcluj.ro). Andrei F. Clitan is with the Railways, Roads and Bridges Department, Technical University of Cuj-Napoca, Romania (e-mail: andrei.clitan@cfdp.utcluj.ro). ensuring the desired temperature level in two distinct areas. Each system has its own heating loop and aims at maintaining the temperature parameters and ensuring thermal comfort for end users, each time the space is used. The proposed heating system is very useful for large homes, were a part of the living area or some of the rooms are not used all the time, are vacant for large period. The implement method guarantees energy consumption reduction without neglecting thermal conform. II. CLASSICAL HEATING SYSTEM In an individual classical heating system, a network of pipes and radiators is used to recirculate hot water as thermal agent, throughout the entire household. The center of the heating network consists of a CHU, with the role of controlling the temperature level by heating hot water in a boiler, using for example gas as supply fuel, as presented in Fig. 1. A pump is needed to circulate the hot water throughout the network, and one thermostat is set in one room to measure and maintain the ambient temperature inside that room. Fig. 1. Classical heating system’s representation. Fig. 2. The classical heating system’s control structure. The classical heating system’s control structure is a closed loop control structure with a negative feedback, intended to Distributed Heating System for Residential Homes Iulia Clitan, Vlad Muresan, Mihail Abrudean, and Andrei F. Clitan International Journal of Modeling and Optimization, Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2021 29 DOI: 10.7763/IJMO.2021.V11.773