An official website of the United States government
In this work, we present recEnergy, a recommender system for reducing energy consumption in commercial buildings with human-in-the-loop. We formulate the building energy optimization problem as a Markov Decision Process, show how deep reinforcement learning can be used to learn energy saving recommendations, and effectively engage occupants in energy-saving actions. is a recommender system that learns actions with high energy saving potential, actively distribute recommendations to occupants in a commercial building, and utilize feedback from the occupants to learn better energy saving recommendations. Over a four week user study, four different types of energy saving recommendations were trained and learned. improves building energy reduction from a baseline saving (passive-only strategy) of 19% to 26%.
more »
« less
RECA: A Multi-Task Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Recommender System for Co-Optimizing Energy, Comfort and Air Quality in Commercial Buildings
We present the design and implementation of RECA, a novel human-centric recommender system for co-optimizing energy consumption, comfort and air quality in commercial buildings. Existing works generally optimize these objectives separately, or by only controlling energy consuming resources within the building without directly engaging occupants. We develop a deep reinforcement learning architecture based on multitask learning, demonstrate how it can be used to jointly learn energy savings, comfort and air quality improvements for different actions, and build a recommender system with humans-in-the-loop. Through real deployments in multiple commercial buildings, we found that RECA has the potential to further reduce energy consumption by up to in energy-focused optimization, improve all objectives by in joint optimization, and improve thermal comfort by up to in comfort and air quality focused optimization, over existing solutions.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1943396
- PAR ID:
- 10527537
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400702303
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 99 to 109
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Istanbul Turkey
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)By arbitraging among consumer comfort margins, buildings energy consumption can be changed by providing flexibility to grids. To manipulate the buildings energy consumption, a new contract-based approach to for multi-zone building heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is proposed. The approach includes the real-time markets by changing buildings optimal consumption pattern based on triggers sent by the aggregator. Also to decrease the energy consumption of buildings, the user is allowed to select the time-slots and rewards are provided to the user for aggregating flexibility. The aggregator bundles flexibility from the buildings at different time-slots and sells in real-time markets. The idea in aggregator's problem is to maximize aggregator's profits by selling flexibility in real-time markets (RTM) while ensuring the provisioning of flexibility from the buildings through incentives. To address this problem, we formulate it as a distributed optimization problem and then provide a method to solve it which provides good scalability, a requirement for large commercial buildings with multiple zones to participate in RTM. We illustrate the scalability and performance of the contract-based approach and solution technique in a building with 200 zones. Also, user participation based on their time-preferences is included in the proposed optimization. Finally, a scalable technique is shown which can be adopted in existing building automation systems.more » « less
-
Thermal comfort and energy efficiency are always the two most significant objectives in HVAC operations. However, for conventional HVAC systems, the pursuit of high energy efficiency may be at the expense of satisfactory thermal comfort. Therefore, even if centralized HVAC systems nowadays have higher energy efficiency than before in office buildings, most of them cannot adapt the dynamic occupant behaviors or individual thermal comfort. In order to realize high energy efficiency while still maintain satisfactory thermal environment for occupants indoors, the integrated hybrid HVAC system has been developed for years such as task-ambient conditioning system. Moreover, the occupant-based HVAC control system such as human- in-the-loop has also been investigated so that the system can be adaptive based on occupant behaviors. However, most of research related to personalized air-conditioning system only focuses on field-study with limited scale (i.e. only one office room), this paper has proposed a co- simulation model in energyplus to simulate the hybrid cooling system with synthetic thermal comfort distributions based on global comfort database I&II. An optimization framework on cooling set-point is proposed with the objective of energy performance and the constraints of thermal comfort distribution developed by unsupervised Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering and kernel density estimation (KDE). The co-simulation results have illustrated that with the proposed optimization algorithm and the hybrid cooling system, HVAC demand power has decreased 5.3% on average with at least 90% of occupants feeling satisfied.more » « less
-
Buildings use 40% of the global energy consumption and emit 30% of CO2 emissions. Of the total building energy, 30-40% is for building heating and cooling systems, which regulate the indoor thermal environment and provide thermal comfort to occupants. Most buildings use forced air technology in the United States to deliver heating/cooling to the targeted thermal zones. Researchers have suggested using radiant heating and cooling systems as a better alternative to all-air systems. Radiant systems supply heating or cooling directly to the building space using radiation released by the heated or cooled building enclosure via the embedded heating or cooling tubes. It is unsure whether the radiant heating and cooling system can provide better thermal comfort to occupants. Moreover, the evaluation method for thermal comfort in the current standard is only suitable for forced air systems. A new plan shall be developed to evaluate the radiation system’s thermal comfort. This paper reviews the experiment-based studies on the thermal comfort of radiant systems. According to the experimental studies regarding thermal comfort and radiant systems, the key findings are concluded to help guide the evaluation of thermal comfort for radiant systems.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Buildings use 40% of the global energy consumption and emit 30% of the CO2 emissions [1]. Of the total building energy, 30-40% are for building heating and cooling systems, which regulate the indoor thermal environment and provide thermal comfort to occupants. In the United States, most buildings use forced air technology to deliver heating/cooling to the targeted thermal zones. However, this system may cause complaints about thermal comfort from inhabitants due to excessive draft movement, inhomogeneous conditioning, and difficulty in accurately controlling the temperature for a system serving multiple rooms. Therefore, researchers have suggested using a radiant heating and cooling system as a better alternative to all-air systems to address these issues. Radiant systems supply heating or cooling directly to the building space using radiation released by the heated or cooled building enclosure via the embedded heating or cooling tubes. In the cooling season, the radiant system often works with a separated dehumidifier to meet space latent and sensible cooling load (called separate sensible and latent cooling system SSLC). The SSLC has shown higher efficiency than forced air systems. However, it is unsure whether the radiant heating and cooling system can provide better thermal comfort to occupants. Moreover, the evaluation method for thermal comfort in the current standard is suitable for forced air systems. Therefore, a new method shall be developed to evaluate the radiation system’s thermal comfort. In this paper, we review the experiment-based studies on the thermal comfort of radiant systems. According to the experimental studies regarding thermal comfort and radiant systems, the key findings are concluded to help guide the evaluation of thermal comfort for radiant systems.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3600100.3623735
