Model-assisted Control Through Co-simulation for Intelligent Building Energy Management Systems Design

Effective and parsimonious use of energy resources and climate control systems is a prerequisite for reduction of energy intensity of the building sector; intelligent Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) can be key ingredients towards achieving this goal. While most BEMS are implemented as a collection of static rules, research effort has been given towards automatic BEMS design. In the present work, a model-based methodology for automatically designing BEMS, developed within PEBBLE FP7 project, is presented. A co-simulation setup is implemented, where a detailed thermal simulation model of the building is used as a surrogate of the real building and, at pre-defined time-intervals, a model-assisted control design optimization is used to produce update control strategies, applied to the building. Moving towards real-world implementation, a middleware integration component is used to facilitate two-way communication between the building (sensing and actuation) layer and the algorithmic layer. Experimental results on a test site located in Greece, indicate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology towards automatically generating good, in terms of energy performance, control strategies