Adaptive Robust Data-driven Building Control via Bi-level Reformulation: an Experimental Result

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust, adaptive data-driven building control method that handles noise and improves energy efficiency and occupant comfort, validated through simulations and real-world experiments.

Contribution

It extends Willems' lemma-based control to handle noise and adaptively optimize building energy use with a bi-level robust formulation.

Findings

Achieved 18.4% energy savings in real-world test

Validated approach with multi-zone simulation and single-zone experiment

Ensured occupant comfort while improving efficiency

Abstract

Data-driven control approaches for the minimization of energy consumption of buildings have the potential to significantly reduce deployment costs and increase uptake of advanced control in this sector. A number of recent approaches based on the application of Willems' fundamental lemma for data-driven controller design from input/output measurements are very promising for deterministic LTI systems. This paper \change{proposes a systematic way to handle unknown measurement noise and measurable process noise}, and extends these data-driven control schemes to adaptive building control via a robust bi-level formulation, whose upper level ensures robustness and whose lower level guarantees prediction quality. Corresponding numerical improvements and an active excitation mechanism are proposed to enable a computationally efficient reliable operation. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is validated by \change{a multi-zone building simulation} and a real-world experiment on a single-zone conference building on the EPFL campus. The real-world experiment includes a 20-day non-stop test, where, without extra modeling effort, our proposed controller improves 18.4\% energy efficiency against an industry-standard controller, while also robustly ensuring occupant comfort.