A Simulation-Based Policy Improvement Method for Joint-Operation of Building Microgrids With Distributed Solar Power and Battery

This paper investigates the joint-operation of building microgrids with distributed solar power and storage battery. The purpose of this paper is to improve the energy efficiency of the building microgrids taking advantage of the complementary building load profiles. Three major contributions are made in this paper. First, in order to incorporate the uncertainties in both the building load and solar power as well as in the communication system, the operation problem is formulated as a finite-stage event-based optimization model. Second, an on-line simulation-based policy improvement method is developed to improve the given control policy and an action aggregation method is applied to accelerate the computational speed. Third, a balanced battery operation strategy considering the expected life cycles is proposed. Numerical examples based on the building microgrids in a university campus are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving the building energy efficiency. The computational time in a practical system is also analyzed.