Balancing Energy Efficiency with Indoor Comfort Using Smart Control Agents: A Simulative Case Study

Abstract

Modern literature exhibits numerous centralized control approaches—event-based or model assisted—for tackling poor energy performance in buildings. Unfortunately, even novel building optimization and control (BOC) strategies commonly suffer from complexity and scalability issues as well as uncertain behavior as concerns large-scale building ecosystems—a fact that hinders their practical compatibility and broader applicability. Moreover, decentralized optimization and control approaches trying to resolve scalability and complexity issues have also been proposed in literature. Those approaches usually suffer from modeling issues, utilizing an analytically available formula for the overall performance index. Motivated by the complications in existing strategies for BOC applications, a novel, decentralized, optimization and control approach—referred to as Local for Global Parameterized Cognitive Adaptive Optimization (L4GPCAO)—has been extensively evaluated in a simulative environment, contrary to previous constrained real-life studies. The current study utilizes an elaborate simulative environment for evaluating the efficiency of L4GPCAO; extensive simulation tests exposed the efficiency of L4GPCAO compared to the already evaluated centralized optimization strategy (PCAO) and the commercial control strategy that is adopted in the BOC practice (common reference case). L4GPCAO achieved a quite similar performance in comparison to PCAO (with 25% less control parameters at a local scale), while both PCAO and L4GPCAO significantly outperformed the reference BOC practice.