Event-Based HVAC Control—A Complexity-Based Approach

The optimal control of the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system in buildings has a significant energy saving potential and therefore is of a great practical interest. An event-based HVAC control adjusts control actions when certain events occur, which may be faster and more scalable than state-based or time-driven control methods. However, events may capture either local or global changes in the rooms. The choice of events is a tradeoff between the computational efficiency and the control performance. This challenging problem remains open. We consider this as an important problem in this paper and make three major contributions. First, we define local and global events for the HVAC control problem. The complexity of these event-based control policies is defined. Second, based on hypothesis testing, we develop a method to select events that capture a sufficient state information and with a relatively small event space. Third, we demonstrate the performance of this method on two groups of examples, including one group of small-scale problems for the proof of concept and the other group of large-scale problems in the HVAC control. It is shown that our method outperforms the Levin search, which is a traditional complexity-based search method and finds event-based HVAC control policies with a good performance.
Note to Practitioners
—When there are multiple rooms in a building, the HVAC control may achieve a significant energy saving and an indoor comfort satisfaction in the same time through exploring the coupling among the rooms. By appropriately defining the events, the size of the event space is usually much smaller than the state space. Therefore, an event-based control is more scalable and preferred in practice. Local events capture the state changes of rooms in a small neighborhood, which leads to a small event space but limited information. Global events capture the state changes of rooms in a large neighborhood, which leads to more information but a large event space. It remains open how to select events in large-scale HVAC control problems, especially when the computing budget is limited. In this paper, we define the complexity of an event-based control policy by the number of neighboring rooms considered. We develop a method based on hypothesis testing to select events with a proper complexity in order to achieve a good system performance. The performance of this method is demonstrated on an HVAC control problem.