China formally applied to rejoin the GATT in 1986. After more than ten years of negotiation, however, China’s entry into WTO seems as remote as ever. This unprecedented long application time in the GATT/WTO history, coupled with the uniqueness of the China case and the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, has made this subject one of the heated topics in the IPE field. Many works have addressed the rules and principles of WTO and status quo of China’s trade regime to imply a gap in between. By doing so, these works emphasize the insufficiency of China’s progresses on reductions of tariff and non-tariff barriers, lack of transparency in its laws and regulations, and the lack of national treatment of foreign companies. These are the major issues on the negotiation table; however, little work has been done the goal of the Chinese economy, which is the reason behind its economic and trade policies and its reform on the regime. To some degree it will have deeper impacts on its policies than the nature of its economy does. Because if China is simply during the transition from non-market economy to market economy, then we can make sure that economic liberation is under way. However, if today China’s situation is a combination of a transitional economy and a nationalist economy, then we have to reconsider the whole framework.

By emphasizing the uniqueness of the China case as both a transitional economy and a nationalistic economy, I shall draw two main propositions from the following analysis. First, neither China nor WTO are ready for China’s accession. Second, the WTO membership is crucial for China’s further openness, but in the meantime, further liberalization is required of China, especially in the area where the role of the state is to be minimized. In the following sections of the paper, I shall first examine the current incompatibility between WTO, an important international economic institution, and China, a complicated unit to be incorporated. I shall then explore the uniqueness of the China case in an attempt to answer the question why neither side is ready for China’s accession at this time. In the end, I shall provide certain policy recommendations for both China and WTO on this matter.

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) is a mechanical system that provides thermal comfort and accepted indoor air quality often instrumented for large-scale buildings. The HVAC system takes a dominant portion of overall building energy consumption and accounts for 50% of the energy used in the U.S. commercial and residential buildings in 2012. The performance and energy saving of building HVAC systems can be significantly improved by the implementation of better and smarter control strategies. Therefore, it is of great benefits to develop automatic, intelligent, optimal and consistent model and control tools to ensure the normal operations of HVAC systems and increase the building energy efficiency.

Motivated by these goals, this thesis presents a parametric modeling approach and a system-level control design for HVAC systems. For the modeling, we establish dynamical models for return air for the air-handiling-unit (AHU) of HVAC systems. The models include temperature and air flow rate models. These models follow the structure of the finite impulse response (FIR) model, and explicitly include the control variables from the AHU, the dynamical states, and the disturbances. Therefore, it is easy to apply this model to control design. Also, the model is flexible with prediction horizon and control horizon with a stability of the accuracy. In data processing, a convolution based low-pass digital filter, Savitzky-Golay filter is used for data smoothing. As a result, the return air flow rate model becomes more feasible with the smoothed data.

Secondly, this thesis study develops a model preidctive control (MPC) algorithm with the application of the dynamical models for AHU optimization problems. This control strategy optimizes the energy consumption of the AHU, and tracks the set points the room temperatures, supply air flow and return air flow rate of the building. The strategy provides physical-based inherent connection between components in AHU by applying damper positions, supply air temperature and outside air flow rate as manipulated variables. The control inputs are explicitly implemented into both the models and objective functions and the optimization structure is computationally efficient. The optimal results show an energy saving average percentage over and track the supply air flow rate and set point of room temperatures in the building effectively. The thermal load, supply air flow rate set points are calculated from thirty-two VAVs, that ensures the internal cooling demand, the static pressure and the ventilation level of the building.

In this thesis, all the data processing and modeling, model validation and implementation of the control algorithm are based on extensive data measurements collected from an office building on the campus of the University of California, at Merced. The control strategy is implemented into the online building automation system (BAS) of the building and can be easily incorporated with other BAS as well because of the explicit formulation.