To improve the global control strategy of current central air - conditioning systems,we adopt a zoning model as a type of local control strategy. We set our research background to be an energy - saving project in Guangdong province involving a central air - conditioning system in a shopping mall. The features of the internal structure of the shopping mall and the formation of its functional zones are analyzed. The building is partitioned according to the similarity of its zones with regard to their functionalities. We then seek for the cooling load rules for individual zones and establish the corresponding mathematical models that agree with the rules. Therefore a locally - adaptive control strategy is formulated aiming to exploit the potential in energy conservation. We compare the operation of this novel system with conventional systems,gathering,recording,querying and analyzing energy consumption data respectively by means of configuration software,and verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the zoning model based control strategy.