Resource management

The goal of this thrust was to develop an adaptive planning and scheduling approach for HVAC operations in response to real-time building environmental demands with significant improvement on overall energy consumption. We have developed proper formulations of different planning and scheduling strategies, which have allowed us to identify the most energy-efficient strategy, and develop suitable computational tools that can overcome the complexity issue. We found that applying pre-cooling properly to individual room demands can significantly reduce energy consumption by combining scheduling of both the air distribution side and the chilled water generation and distribution side. Our strategy is adaptive and real-time, which has a potential to quickly respond to users’ HVAC service demands and create a comfortable building environment with low energy consumption. Additionally, we have developed a formulation of HVAC planning and scheduling strategy with non-preemptive air distribution, and investigated the feasibility of applying a nested partition method to solve the corresponding optimization problem. The formulation covers different aspects of HVAC operations such as room comfort, air distribution, chilled water distribution and chiller operations. The latest simulation results have shown a possibility of significant energy saving under this strategy.