Residential consumers can use the demand response program (DRP) if they can utilize the home energy management system (HEMS), which reduces consumer costs by automatically adjusting air conditioning (AC) setpoints and shifting some appliances to off-peak hours. If HEMS knows occupancy status, consumers can gain more economic benefits and thermal comfort. However, for the building occupancy status, direct sensing is costly, inaccurate, and intrusive for residents. So, forecasting algorithms could serve as an effective alternative. The goal of this study is to present a non-intrusive, accurate, and cost-effective approach, to develop a multi-objective simulation model for the application of DRPs in a smart residential house, where (a) electrical load demand reduction, (b) adjustment in thermal comfort (AC) temperature setpoints, and (c) , worst cases scenario approach is very conservative. Because that is unlikely all uncertain parameters take their worst values at all times. So, the flexible robust counterpart optimization along with uncertainty budgets is developed to consider uncertainty realistically. Simulated results indicate that considering uncertainty increases the costs by 36 percent and decreases the AC temperature setpoints. Besides, using DRPs reduces demand by shifting some appliance operations to off-peak hours and lowers costs by 13.2 percent.
The residential buildings sector is one of the largest electricity consumers worldwide and contributes disproportionally to peak electricity demand in many regions. Strongly driven by occupant activities at home, household energy consumption is stochastic and heterogeneous in nature. However, most residential building energy models applied by industry use homogeneous, deterministic occupant activity schedules, which work well for predictions of annual energy consumption, but can result in unrealistic hourly or sub-hourly electric load profiles, with exaggerated or muted peaks. This mattered le…
Thermal comfort in shared spaces is essential to occupants well-being and necessary in the management of energy consumption. Existing thermal control systems for indoor shared spaces adjust temperature set points mechanically, making it difficult to intelligently achieve thermal comfort for all. Recent studies have shown that thermal comfort in a shared space is difficult to achieve due to individual preferences and the inability of occupants to reach a thermal compromise on temperature set points. This paper proposes a thermal comfort system to automatically adjust the temperature set-points …
Building occupant behavior drives significant differences in building energy use, even in automated buildings. Users' distrust in the automation causes them to override settings. This results in responses that fail to satisfy both the occupants' and/or the building automation's objectives. The transition toward grid-interactive efficient buildings will make this evermore important as complex building control systems optimize not only for comfort, but also changing electricity costs. This paper presents a data-driven approach to study thermal comfort behavior dynamics which are not captured by …
A novel centralized model predictive control (MPC) is proposed for comfort and energy management in a residential building. The residential setup used here is equipped with a photovoltaic (PV) solar system and a stationary home battery unit. An air-to-air multi-split heat pump (HP) is used as the primary heating system. The electric baseboard (BB) unit in each zone is used as a secondary system. The MPC is simultaneously responsible for controlling the heating inputs of the HP and BB units for comfort management, as well as for the control of energy flow between the PV, the home battery and th…
Demand-side response from space heating in residential buildings can potentially provide a huge amount of flexibility for the power system, particularly with deep electrification of the heat sector. In this context, this paper presents a novel distributed control strategy to coordinate space heating across numerous residential households with diversified thermal parameters. By employing an iterative algorithm under the game-theoretical framework, each household adjusts its own heating schedule through demand shift and thermal comfort compensation with the purpose of achieving individual cost s…
Comparative Field Deployment of Reinforcement Learning and Model Predictive Control for Residential HVAC
College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA；Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA；Center for High Performance Buildings, Purdue University, 177 S Russell St, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA；Trane Technologies, Residential R\&D Group, 6200 Troup Hwy, Tyler, TX 75707, USA；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence
MERLIN: Multi-agent offline and transfer learning for occupant-centric energy flexible operation of grid-interactive communities using smart meter data and CityLearn
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Electric Power Research Institute（电力科学研究院）
It is estimated that about 40%-50% of total electricity consumption in commercial buildings can be attributed to Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Minimizing the energy cost while considering the thermal comfort of the occupants is very challenging due to unknown and complex relationships between various HVAC controls and thermal dynamics inside a building. To this end, we present a multi-agent, distributed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework based on Energy Plus simulation environment for optimizing HVAC in commercial buildings. This framework learns the compl…
In this study, a novel application of neural networks that predict thermal comfort states of occupants is proposed with accuracy over 95%, and two optimization algorithms are proposed and evaluated under two real cases (general offices and lecture theatres/conference rooms scenarios) in Singapore. The two optimization algorithms are Bayesian Gaussian process optimization (BGPO) and augmented firefly algorithm (AFA). Based on our earlier studies, the models of energy consumption were developed and well-trained through neural networks. This study focuses on using novel active approaches to evalu…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Università degli Studi dell’Aquila（拉奎拉大学）
Model predictive control (MPC) can provide significant energy cost savings in building operations in the form of energy-efficient control with better occupant comfort, lower peak demand charges, and risk-free participation in demand response. However, the engineering effort required to obtain physics-based models of buildings is considered to be the biggest bottleneck in making MPC scalable to real buildings. In this paper, we propose a data-driven control algorithm based on neural networks to reduce this cost of model identification. Our approach does not require building domain expertise or …
The building sector consumes the largest energy in the world, and there have been considerable research interests in energy consumption and comfort management of buildings. Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), this paper aims at assessing the potential of RL in building climate control problems with occupant interaction. We apply a recent RL approach, called DDPG (deep deterministic policy gradient), for the continuous building control tasks and assess its performance with simulation studies in terms of its ability to handle (a) the partial state observability due to sen…
Bayesian Learning of Consumer Preferences for Residential Demand Response
V.A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院V.A.特拉佩兹尼科夫控制科学研究所）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究所）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国家研究型高等经济学院）
This paper proposes a novel congestion mitigation strategy for low voltage residential feeders in which the rising power demand due to the electrification of the transport and heating systems leads to congestion problems. The strategy is based on requiring residential customers to limit their demand for a certain amount of time in exchange for economic benefits. The main novelty of the method consists of combining a thorough representation of the network physics with advanced constraints that ensure the comfort of residential users, in a scalable manner that suits real systems. The mitigation …
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Energy consumption in buildings, both residential and commercial, accounts for approximately 40% of all energy usage in the U.S., and similar numbers are being reported from countries around the world. This significant amount of energy is used to maintain a comfortable, secure, and productive environment for the occupants. So, it is crucial that the energy consumption in buildings must be optimized, all the while maintaining satisfactory levels of occupant comfort, health, and safety. Recently, Machine Learning has been proven to be an invaluable tool in deriving important insights from data a…
Demand side management (DSM) is one of the main functionalities of the smart grid as it allows the consumer to adjust its energy consumption for an efficient energy management. Most of the existing DSM techniques aim at minimizing the energy cost while not considering the comfort of consumers. Therefore, maintaining a trade-off between these two conflicting objectives is still a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel DSM approach for residential consumers based on a non-cooperative game theoretic approach, where each player is encouraged to reshape its electricity consumption pattern th…
In this paper, we propose a combined energy and comfort optimization (CECO) strategy for the air conditioning (A/C) system of the connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). By leveraging the weather and traffic predictions enabled by the emerging CAV technologies, the proposed strategy is able to minimize the A/C system energy consumption while maintaining the occupant thermal comfort (OTC) within the comfort constraints, where the comfort is quantified by a modified predictive mean vote (PMV) model adapted for an automotive application. A general CECO problem is formulated and addressed using m…
Mohammed V University in Rabat（拉巴特穆罕默德五世大学）；MENTIS Consulting SA（MENTIS咨询公司）；University of Nebraska at Kearney（内布拉斯加大学科尔尼分校）；Information Technology University（信息技术大学）；Alfaisal University（费萨尔大学）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Western Michigan University（西密歇根大学）；Alakhawayn University in Ifrane（伊夫兰阿赫拉因大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）
Building operations represent a significant percentage of the total primary energy consumed in most countries due to the proliferation of Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) installations in response to the growing demand for improved thermal comfort. Reducing the associated energy consumption while maintaining comfortable conditions in buildings are conflicting objectives and represent a typical optimization problem that requires intelligent system design. Over the last decade, different methodologies based on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been deployed to find…
The heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system accounts for substantial energy use in buildings, whereas a large group of occupants are still not actually feeling comfortable staying inside. This poses the issue of developing energy-efficient HVAC control, i.e., reduce energy use (cost) while simultaneously enhancing human comfort. This paper pursues the objective and studies the stochastic optimal HVAC control subject to uncertain thermal demand (i.e., the weather and occupancy etc). Particularly, we involve the elaborate predicted mean vote (PMV) thermal comfort model in the opt…
This work investigates the extent to which phase change material (PCM) in the building's envelope can be used as an alternative to battery storage systems to increase self-consumption of rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) generation. In particular, we explore the electricity cost-savings and increase in PV self-consumption that can be achieved by using PCMs and the operation of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system optimised by a home energy management system (HEMS). In more detail, we consider a HEMS with an HVAC system, rooftop PV, and a PCM layer integrated into the buil…
Energy savings from efficiency methods in individual residential buildings are measured in 10's of dollars, while the energy savings from such measures nationally would amount to 10's of billions of dollars, leading to the "tragedy of the commons" effect. The way out of this situation is via deployment of automated, integrated residential energy systems, that provide the user with a seamless, cost effective service leading to improvement of comfort and residential experience. Models are of critical importance in this context, as intelligent operating systems depend on them strongly. However, m…
Participation in residential energy demand response programs requires an active role by the consumers. They contribute flexibility in how they use their appliances as the means to adjust energy consumption, and reduce demand peaks, possibly at the expense of their own comfort (e.g., thermal). Understanding the collective potential of appliance-level flexibility for reducing demand peaks is challenging and complex. For instance, physical characteristics of appliances, usage preferences, and comfort requirements all influence consumer flexibility, adoption, and effectiveness of demand response p…
