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Title: Online Learning for Commercial Buildings

Conference ·

There is increasing interest in designing optimization-based techniques for the control of building heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems for either improving the energy efficiency of buildings or providing ancillary services to the electric grid. The performance of such prediction-based control techniques relies heavily on models of a building's thermal dynamics. However, the development of high-fidelity building thermal dynamic models is challenging, given the presence of large uncertainties that affect thermal loads in buildings, such as building envelope performance, thermal mass, internal heat gains, and occupant behavior. In this paper, we propose a method to identify both a resistive-capacitive parametric model and nonparametric load uncertainties using measured input-output data. The parametric model is obtained using semiparametric regression, whereas the nonparametric terms are based on the Random Forest algorithm in which regression trees are used to derive the dependency of nonparametric terms on both building operation parameters and ambient temperature. The effectiveness of the method is evaluated using experimental data collected from an office building at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) campus. The proposed methodology was observed to provide improved accuracy over appropriate baseline strategies in predicting indoor air temperatures.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1530112
Resource Relation:
Conference: The Tenth ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy) - Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America - 6/25/2019 8:00:00 AM-6/28/2019 8:00:00 AM
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (11)

Building modeling as a crucial part for building predictive control journal January 2013
Issues in identification of control-oriented thermal models of zones in multi-zone buildings
  • Lin, Yashen; Middelkoop, Timothy; Barooah, Prabir
  • 2012 IEEE 51st Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2012 IEEE 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) https://doi.org/10.1109/CDC.2012.6425958
conference December 2012
How demand response from commercial buildings will provide the regulation needs of the grid conference October 2012
Semi-automated modular modeling of buildings for model predictive control
  • Sturzenegger, David; Gyalistras, Dimitrios; Morari, Manfred
  • Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Buildings https://doi.org/10.1145/2422531.2422550
conference November 2012
An Internet of Things Framework for Smart Energy in Buildings: Designs, Prototype, and Experiments journal December 2015
Smart Connected Buildings Design Automation: Foundations and Trends journal January 2016
Energy analysis of a building using artificial neural network: A review journal October 2013
Comparison of machine learning methods for estimating energy consumption in buildings conference July 2014
Experimental Evaluation of Frequency Regulation From Commercial Building HVAC Systems journal March 2015
Quantitative comparison of data-driven and physics-based models for commercial building HVAC systems conference May 2017
Identifying models of HVAC systems using semiparametric regression conference June 2012

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