Center for the Built Environment

We introduce a systematic approach for analyzing the energy consumption of four control policies (i.e., zone level daily optimal control, zone level annual optimal control, building level daily optimal control, building level annual optimal control), which differed based on their temporal and spatial control scales. In order to integrate occupant thermal comfort requirements, we defined uniformly distributed random constraint functions on the setpoints. We used the DOE reference small office building in three U.S. climate zones for simulating the performances of control policies, using EnergyPlus. Among the four control policies, the building level annual control policy showed close to the highest energy efficiency (27.76% to 50.91% (average of 39.81%) savings depending on the climate) with comparatively small training data requirements. In addition, the building level daily optimal setpoint selection, subject to thermal comfort constraints, leads to 17.64 – 38.37% (average of 26.61%) energy savings depending on the climate. We also demonstrate that temporal scale of the policies have a statistically significant impact on the small office building’s energy consumption while spatial scale’s impact is insignificant.