Application of economic MPC to the energy and demand minimization of a commercial building

• An application of EMPC is presented for optimizing the building energy cost.
• The control strategy is comprised of an economic objective function.
• The optimization is a min–max problem and is converted to a linear program.
• The EMPC method is implemented in a commercial office building.
• An internet-based control framework is developed to carry out tests.

This paper presents an application case study of an economic model predictive control (EMPC) method for optimizing the building demand and energy cost under the time-of-use price policy. The control strategy is comprised of an economic objective function that accounts for the combination of energy and demand costs with a time-of-use rate structure, a dynamic thermal process and power model of the building thermal mass dynamics, and a set of constraints to ensure the building is operated properly. The optimization is a min–max optimization problem and is converted to a linear program. The EMPC method is implemented in a commercial office building located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. An internet-based control architecture is developed to carry out tests with the EMPC controller at a remote location. The test results show that the EMPC strategy is capable of shifting the peak demand to off-peak hours and reducing energy costs compared to a baseline case for the building.