The existing literature on energy saving focuses on large-scale buildings, wherein the energy-saving potential is substantially larger than smaller-scale buildings. However, the research intensity is significantly less for small-scale deployments and their capacities to regulate energy use individually, directly and without depreciating users’ comfort and needs. The current research effort focused on energy saving and user satisfaction, concerning a low-cost—yet technically sophisticated—methodology for controlling conventional residential HVAC units through cheap yet reliable actuation and sensing and auxiliary IoT equipment. The basic ingredients of the proposed experimental methodology involve a conventional A/C unit, an Arduino microcontroller, typical wireless IoT sensors and actuators, a configured graphical environment and a sophisticated, model-free, optimization-and-control algorithm (PCAO) that portrays the ground basis for achieving improved performance results in comparison with conventional methods. The main goal of this study was to produce a system that would adequately and expeditiously achieve energy savings by utilizing minimal hardware/equipment (affordability). The system was designed to be easily expandable in terms of new units or thermal equipment (expandability) and also to be autonomous, requiring zero user interventions at the experimental site (automation). The real-life measurements were collected over two different seasonal periods of the year (winter, summer) and concerned a conventional apartment in the city of Xanthi, Northern Greece, where summers and winters exhibit quite diverse climate characteristics. The final results revealed the increased efficiency of PCAO’s optimization in comparison with a conventional rule-based control strategy (RBC), as concerns energy savings and user satisfaction.@en

Managing grid-connected charging stations for fleets of electric vehicles leads to an optimal control problem where user preferences must be met with minimum energy costs (e.g., by exploiting lower electricity prices through the day, renewable energy production, and stored energy of parked vehicles). Instead of state-of-the-art charging scheduling based on open-loop strategies that explicitly depend on initial operating conditions, this paper proposes an approximate dynamic programming feedback-based optimization method with continuous state space and action space, where the feedback action guarantees
uniformity with respect to initial operating conditions, while price variations in the electricity and available solar energy are handled automatically in the optimization. The resulting control action is a multi-modal feedback, which is shown to handle a wide range of operating regimes, via a set of controllers whose action that can be activated or deactivated depending on availability
of solar energy and pricing model. Extensive simulations via a charging test case demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.@en

Load management actions in large buildings are pre-programmed by field engineers/users in the form of if-then-else rules for the set point of the thermostat. This fixed set of actions prevents smart zoning, i.e. to dynamically regulate the set points in every room at different levels according to geometry, orientation and interaction among rooms caused by occupancy patterns. In this work we frame the problem of load management with smart zoning into a multiple-mode feedback-based optimal control problem: multiple-mode refers to embedding multiple behaviors (triggered by building-occupant dynamic interaction) into the optimization problem; feedback-based refers to adopting a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman framework, with closed-loop control strategies using information stemming from building and weather states. The framework is solved by parameterizing the candidate control strategies and by searching for the optimal strategy in an adaptive self-tuning way. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we employ an EnergyPlus model of an actual office building in Crete, Greece. Extensive tests show that the proposed solution is able to provide, dynamically and autonomously, dedicated set points levels in every room in such a way to optimize the whole building performance (exploitation of renewable energy sources with improved thermal comfort). As compared to pre-programmed (non-optimal) strategies, we show that smart zoning makes it is possible to save more than 15% energy consumption, with 25% increased thermal comfort. As compared to optimized strategies in which smart zoning is not implemented, smart zoning leads to additional 4% reduced energy and 8% improved comfort, demonstrating improved occupant-building interaction. Such improvements are motivated by the fact that the approach exploits the building dynamics as learned from feedback data. Moreover, the closed-loop feature of the approach makes it robust to variable weather conditions and occupancy schedules.

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This paper proposes a Cognitive Stochastic Approximation (CSA)-based optimization method for charging an EV (electric vehicle) fleet, using a single, aggregate battery model. The charging station can either utilize the batteries of the parked vehicles to charge the vehicles before they leave, or can use power from the grid. The objective is to optimize the charging task with minimum energy costs, possibly taking into account price variations in the electricity price. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that it provides a nearly to optimal solution in the presence of uncertain charging/discharging dynamics. The method is evaluated through a numerical model of a grid-connected charging station. Four scenarios with different electricity price models are studied. The CSA optimization results are compared with the results obtained by a rule-based charging algorithm and by an open-loop optimal control algorithm: the results illustrate the advantages of the proposed CSA algorithm in minimizing the charging cost, satisfying the aggregate battery charge sustaining conditions and providing robust solutions in the presence of time-varying vehicle schedules.@en

Microgrids equipped with small-scale renewable-energy generation systems and energy storage units offer challenging opportunity from a control point of view. In fact, in order to improve resilience and enable islanded mode, micro-grid energy management systems must dynamically manage controllable loads by considering not only matching energy generation and consumption, but also thermal comfort of the occupants. Thermal comfort, which is often neglected or oversimplified, plays a major role in dynamic demand response, especially in front of intermittent behavior of the renewable energy sources. This paper presents a novel control algorithm for joint demand response management and thermal comfort optimization in a microgrid composed of a block of buildings, a photovoltaic array, a wind turbine, and an energy storage unit. In order to address the large-scale nature of the problem, the proposed control strategy adopt a two-level supervisory strategy: at the lower level, each building employs a local controller that processes only local measurements; at the upper level, a centralized unit supervises and updates the three controllers with the aim of minimizing the aggregate energy cost and thermal discomfort of the microgrid. Comparisons with alternative strategies reveal that the proposed supervisory strategy efficiently manages the demand response so as to sensibly improve independence of the microgrid with respect to the main grid, and guarantees at the same time thermal comfort of the occupants.

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