An Iterative Optimization and Learning-Based IoT System for Energy Management of Connected Buildings

Buildings account for nearly 40% of primary energy and 36% of greenhouse emissions, which is one of the main factors driving climate change. Reducing energy consumption in buildings toward zero-energy buildings is a vital pillar to ensure that future climate and energy targets are reached. However, due to the high uncertainty of building loads and customer comfort demands, and extremely nonlinear building thermal characteristics, developing an effective zero-energy building energy management (BEM) technology is facing great challenges. This article proposes a novel learning-based and iterative Internet of Things (IoT) system to address these challenges to achieve the zero-energy objective in BEM of connected buildings. First, all buildings in the IoT-based BEM system share their operation data with an aggregator. Second, the aggregator uses these historical data to train a deep reinforcement learning model based on the deep deterministic policy gradient method. The learning model generates precooling or preheating control actions to achieve zero-energy BEM for building heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Third, for solving the coupling problem between HVAC systems and building internal heat gain loads, an iterative optimization algorithm is developed to integrate physics-based and learning-based models to minimize the deviation between the on-site solar photovoltaic generated energy and the actual building energy consumption by properly scheduling building loads, electric vehicle charging cycles, and the energy-storage system. Finally, the optimal load operation scheduling is generated by considering customers’ comfort requirements. All connected buildings then operate their loads based on the load operation schedule issued by the aggregator. The proposed learning-based and iterative IoT system is validated via simulation with real-world building data from the Pecan Street project.