Energy Management-Based Predictive Controller for a Smart Building Powered by Renewable Energy

This paper presents a smart building energy management system (BEMS), which is in charge of optimally controlling the sustainable operation of a building-integrated-microgrid (BIM). The main objective is to develop an advanced high-level centralized control approach-based model predictive control (MPC) considering variations of renewable sources and loads. A finite-horizon planning optimization problem is developed to control the operation of the BIM. The model can be implemented as a BEMS for the BIM to manipulate the indoor temperature and optimize the operation of the system's units. A centralized MPC-based algorithm is implemented for the power management scheduling of all sub-systems as well as power exchanges with the electrical grid. The MPC algorithm is verified over case studies applied to two floors residential building considering the climate condition of a typical day of March, where the effects of both loads and thermal resistance of building shell on the operation of the BIM are analyzed via numerical simulations. The analysis shows that 96% of the total electrical load has been fulfilled by the local production where 23% represents the total electric output of the micro-CHP and 73% is the renewable energy production. The deficit, which represents only 4%, is purchased from the electrical distribution network (EDN).