MuFlex: A Scalable, Physics-based Platform for Multi-Building Flexibility Analysis and Coordination

TL;DR

MuFlex is an open-source, physics-based platform enabling multi-building demand flexibility analysis and coordination, supporting detailed models and standardized RL benchmarking, demonstrated by reducing peak demand by nearly 12%.

Contribution

It introduces MuFlex, a scalable, multi-building simulation platform that integrates detailed physical models with RL benchmarking capabilities, filling a gap in existing tools.

Findings

Successfully coordinated demand flexibility across four buildings.

Reduced peak demand by nearly 12% using Soft Actor-Critic.

Demonstrated scalability across various building clusters.

Abstract

With the increasing penetration of renewable generation on the power grid, maintaining system balance requires coordinated demand flexibility from aggregations of buildings. Reinforcement learning has been widely explored for building controls because of its model-free nature. Open-source simulation testbeds are essential not only for training RL agents but also for fairly benchmarking control strategies. However, most building-sector testbeds target single buildings; multi-building platforms are relatively limited and typically rely on simplified models (e.g., Resistance-Capacitance) or data-driven approaches, which lack the ability to fully capture the physical intricacies and intermediate variables necessary for interpreting control performance. Moreover, these platforms often impose fixed inputs, outputs, and model formats, restricting their applicability as benchmarking tools across diverse control scenarios. To address these gaps, MuFlex, a scalable, open-source platform for multi-building flexibility coordination, was developed. MuFlex enables synchronous information exchange and co-simulation across multiple detailed building models programmed in EnergyPlus and Modelica, and adheres to the latest OpenAI Gym interface, providing a modular, standardized RL implementation. The platform's physics-based capabilities and workflow were demonstrated in a case study coordinating demand flexibility across four office buildings using the Soft Actor-Critic algorithm. The results show that under four buildings' coordination, SAC effectively reduced the aggregated peak demand by nearly 12% with maintained indoor comfort to ensure the power demand below the threshold. Additionally, the platform's scalability was investigated through computational benchmarking on building clusters with varying sizes, model types, and simulation programs.