With the building sector being responsible for 30% of the total final energy consumption, great interest lies in implementing adequate policies and deploying efficient technologies that would decrease this number. However, building comfort and energy management systems (BCEM) are challenging to manage on account of their increasing complexity with regard to the integration of renewable energy sources or the connection of electrical, thermal and gas grids. Multi-agent systems (MAS) deal well with such complex issues. This paper presents an MAS for non-residential buildings from the design, implementation and demonstration, both simulation based and in a field test. Starting from an ontology and an attached data model for BCEM application, we elaborated use cases for developing and testing the MAS framework. The building and technical equipment are modeled using the modeling language Modelica under Dymola. The agents are programmed in JADE and communicate with Dymola via TCP/IP and with the real devices via BACnet. Operatively, the agents can take on different control strategies: normal operation with no optimization, optimization of energy costs, where energy is delivered through the room through the devices that have the lowest operating costs, and relaxation of the comfort constraint, where the costs of the productivity loss under sub-optimal comfort conditions is taken into account during optimization. Comfort is expressed as a function of indoor air temperature. Simulation, including a comparison with a benchmark system, and field test results are presented to demonstrate the features of the proposed BCEM.
This paper presents an application of coupling Modelica under Dymola and JADE to test novel agent-based control for office spaces. The office space with a coupled energy system and weather boundary conditions are modeled in Dymola. The agent platform is programmed in JADE, where the agents communicate with each other to control the technical equipment used to deliver thermal energy to the room. Heating experiments, run for a one room scenario, using a radiator, show better system reaction to the comfort desires of the user compared to a control with a thermostatic valve, while having similar energy consumption. While the agents run in real time, the simulation in Dymola runs faster. We focus on the particularities of the connection for co-simulation to insure smooth transferability of the experiments from simulation to a field test, where the energy system as well as the agent platform would be running in real time.
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