Energy Management of Buildings with Phase Change Materials Based on Dynamic Programming

The thermal inertia of buildings is a flexible resource that can be used for shaping the space heating and cooling demand. However, in some countries, especially Australia, a large number of buildings have low thermal inertia. Given this context, this paper builds on the literature introducing phase change materials (PCM) to improve buildings' thermal inertia. Our main focus is to address the challenges of energy management in buildings with PCM. The corresponding optimisation problem involves scheduling an HVAC system while considering the PCM layer as an energy storage system. Solving this problem requires a technique that can deal with the nonlinear nonconvex characteristic of the PCM. We use dynamic programming (DP), which suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Given this drawback, we present preliminary work on developing computationally efficient DP methods for energy management with PCMs. We demonstrate that the proposed method produces high-quality solutions and yields considerable cost savings.