Optimal Control Strategies for Building Energy Consumption

This thesis discusses the operational coordination of electrical appliances and devices in a smart home. At present, the diminishing volume of fossil fuels and the increasing pressure to use renewable sources of energy necessitate the integration of such volatile sources into electrical grids. This process, however, results in higher energy costs, and the consumers are thus more willing to change their behaviour to either reduce the expenses or maintain them at a reasonable level. One of the relatively few customer-oriented options to optimise energy costs consists in the demand – response principle, which utilises external information to minimise energy consumption during high price periods. Assuming the constantly changing conditions in electrical grids, and thus also the varying demands, it is vital to provide for automatic optimisation excluding the need of user intervention. The thesis presents a method which, after being implemented into the control member, will facilitate the optimal use of appliances and devices within a smart home. As the behaviour considered optimal from the perspective of demand - response is often inconsistent with the consumer‘s requirements for comfortable use of the appliances, the proposed technique offers a compromise through enabling the consumer to select the appropriate strategy. Five universal optimisation models are designed within the thesis; these models facilitate description of common home appliances and local electricity sources. The core of the method lies in formulating and optimising a mixed integer quadratic problem (MIQP). The optimisation task yields an operational schedule for the individual appliances, and this scheme considers the energy costs, the working cycle of the appliance, the user’s demands, the system restrictions and/or other input data. Furthermore, the author extends the above-discussed general technique, enabling it to adopt robust behaviour. The method then secures the preset strategy even during a marked change of the input conditions, and its robustness is a viable precondition for the overall applicability of the technique in the real control member