Data-Driven Predictive Control for Commercial Buildings with Multiple Energy Flexibility Sources

Abstract

Data-Driven Predictive Control, representing the building as a cyber-physical system, shows promising potential in harnessing energy flexibility for demand side management, where the efforts in developing a physics-based model can be significant. Here, predictive control using random forests is applied in a case study closed-loop simulation of a large office building with multiple energy flexibility sources, thereby testing the suitability of the technique for such buildings. Further, consideration is given to the feature selection and feature engineering process. The results show that the data-driven predictive control, under a dynamic grid signal, is capable of minimising energy consumption or energy cost.