Building energy forecasting using system identification based on system characteristics test

Buildings, consuming over 70% of the electricity in the U.S., play significant roles in smart grid infrastructure. The automatic operation of buildings and their subsystems in responding to signals from a smart grid is essential to reduce energy consumption and demand, as well as improve the resilience to power disruptions. In order to achieve such automatic operation, high fidelity and computationally efficiency building energy forecasting models under different weather and operation conditions are needed. Currently, data-driven (black box) models and hybrid (grey box) models are commonly used in model based building control operation. However, typical black box models often require long training period and are bounded to weather and operation conditions during the training period. On the other hand, creating a grey box model often requires long calculation time due to parameter optimization process and expert knowledge during the model structure determining and simplification process. An earlier study by the authors proposed a system identification approach to develop computationally efficient and accurate building energy forecasting models. This paper attempts to extend this early study and to quantitatively evaluate how the most important characteristics of a building energy system: its nonlinearity and response time, affect the system identification process and model accuracy. Two commercial building: a small-size and a medium-size commercial building, with varying chiller nonlinearity, are simulated using EnergyPlus in lieu of real buildings for model development and validation. The system identification method proposed in the early study is applied to these two buildings that have varying nonlinearity and response time. Adaption of the proposed system identification method based on systems' nonlinearity and response time is proposed in this study. The energy forecasting results demonstrate that the adaption is capable of significantly improve the performance of the system identification model.