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- May, Ross
(författare)
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The reinforcement learning method : A feasible and sustainable control strategy for efficient occupant-centred building operation in smart cities
- 2019
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a trend which is expected to only grow as we move further into the future. With this increasing trend in urbanisation, challenges are presented in the form of the management of urban infrastructure systems. As an essential infrastructure of any city, the energy system presents itself as one of the biggest challenges. As cities expand in population and economically, global energy consumption increases and as a result so do greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To achieve the 2030 Agenda’s sustainable development goal on energy (SDG 7), renewable energy and energy efficiency have been shown as key strategies for attaining SDG 7. As the largest contributor to climate change, the building sector is responsible for more than half of the global final energy consumption and GHG emissions. As people spend most of their time indoors, the demand for energy is made worse as a result of maintaining the comfort level of the indoor environment. However, the emergence of the smart city and the internet of things (IoT) offers the opportunity for the smart management of buildings. Focusing on the latter strategy towards attaining SDG 7, intelligent building control offers significant potential for saving energy while respecting occupant comfort (OC). Most intelligent control strategies, however, rely on complex mathematical models which require a great deal of expertise to construct thereby costing in time and money. Furthermore, if these are inaccurate then energy is wasted and the comfort of occupants is decreased. Moreover, any change in the physical environment such as retrofits result in obsolete models which must be re-identified to match the new state of the environment. This model-based approach seems unsustainable and so a new model-free alternative is proposed. One such alternative is the reinforcement learning (RL) method. This method provides a beautiful solution to accomplishing the tradeoff between energy efficiency and OC within the smart city and more importantly to achieving SDG 7. To address the feasibility of RL as a sustainable control strategy for efficient occupant-centred building operation, a comprehensive review of RL for controlling OC in buildings as well as a case study implementing RL for improving OC via a window system are presented. The outcomes of each seem to suggest RL as a feasible solution, however, more work is required in the form of addressing current open issues such as cooperative multi-agent RL (MARL) needed for multi-occupant/multi-zonal buildings.
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| 2. |
- Carling, Kenneth, et al.
(författare)
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GRASP and statistical bounds for heuristic solutions to combinatorial problems
- 2016
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The quality of a heuristic solution to a NP-hard combinatorial problem is hard to assess. A few studies have advocated and tested statistical bounds as a method for assessment. These studies indicate that statistical bounds are superior to the more widely known and used deterministic bounds. However, the previous studies have been limited to a few metaheuristics and combinatorial problems and, hence, the general performance of statistical bounds in combinatorial optimization remains an open question. This work complements the existing literature on statistical bounds by testing them on the metaheuristic Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures (GRASP) and four combinatorial problems. Our findings confirm previous results that statistical bounds are reliable for the p-median problem, while we note that they also seem reliable for the set covering problem. For the quadratic assignment problem, the statistical bounds has previously been found reliable when obtained from the Genetic algorithm whereas in this work they found less reliable. Finally, we provide statistical bounds to four 2-path network design problem instances for which the optimum is currently unknown.
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| 3. |
- Carling, Kenneth, et al.
(författare)
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Measuring CO2 emissions induced by online and brick-and-mortar retailing
- 2014
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We develop a method for empirically measuring the difference in carbon footprint between traditional and online retailing (“e-tailing”) from entry point to a geographical area to consumer residence. The method only requires data on the locations of brick-and-mortar stores, online delivery points, and residences of the region’s population, and on the goods transportation networks in the studied region. Such data are readily available in most countries, so the method is not country or region specific. The method has been evaluated using data from the Dalecarlia region in Sweden, and is shown to be robust to all assumptions made. In our empirical example, the results indicate that the average distance from consumer residence to a brick-and-mortar retailer is 48.54 km in the studied region, while the average distance to an online delivery point is 6.7 km. The results also indicate that e-tailing increases the average distance traveled from the regional entry point to the delivery point from 47.15 km for a brick-and-mortar store to 122.75 km for the online delivery points. However, as professional carriers transport the products in bulk to stores or online delivery points, which is more efficient than consumers’ transporting the products to their residences, the results indicate that consumers switching from traditional to e-tailing on average reduce their CO2 footprints by 84% when buying standard consumer electronics products.
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| 4. |
- Carlucci, S., et al.
(författare)
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Modeling occupant behavior in buildings
- 2020
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Ingår i: Building and Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0360-1323 .- 1873-684X. ; 174
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Han, Mengjie, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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A novel reinforcement learning method for improving occupant comfort via window opening and closing
- 2020
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Ingår i: Sustainable cities and society. - : Elsevier BV. - 2210-6707. ; 61
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- An occupant's window opening and closing behaviour can significantly influence the level of comfort in the indoor environment. Such behaviour is, however, complex to predict and control conventionally. This paper, therefore, proposes a novel reinforcement learning (RL) method for the advanced control of window opening and closing. The RL control aims at optimising the time point for window opening/closing through observing and learning from the environment. The theory of model-free RL control is developed with the objective of improving occupant comfort, which is applied to historical field measurement data taken from an office building in Beijing. Preliminary testing of RL control is conducted by evaluating the control method’s actions. The results show that the RL control strategy improves thermal and indoor air quality by more than 90 % when compared with the actual historically observed occupant data. This methodology establishes a prototype for optimally controlling window opening and closing behaviour. It can be further extended by including more environmental parameters and more objectives such as energy consumption. The model-free characteristic of RL avoids the disadvantage of implementing inaccurate or complex models for the environment, thereby enabling a great potential in the application of intelligent control for buildings.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Han, Mengjie, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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An Approach to Data Acquisition for Urban Building Energy Modeling Using a Gaussian Mixture Model and Expectation-Maximization Algorithm
- 2021
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Ingår i: Buildings. - : MDPI. - 2075-5309. ; 11:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In recent years, a building’s energy performance is becoming uncertain because of factors such as climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, stochastic occupant behavior and inefficient building control systems. Sufficient measurement data is essential to predict and manage a building’s performance levels. Assessing energy performance of buildings at an urban scale requires even larger data samples in order to perform an accurate analysis at an aggregated level. However, data are not only expensive, but it can also be a real challenge for communities to acquire large amounts of real energy data. This is despite the fact that inadequate knowledge of a full population will lead to biased learning and the failure to establish a data pipeline. Thus, this paper proposes a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm that will produce synthetic building energy data. This method is tested on real datasets. The results show that the parameter estimates from the model are stable and close to the true values. The bivariate model gives better performance in classification accuracy. Synthetic data points generated by the models show a consistent representation of the real data. The approach developed here can be useful for building simulations and optimizations with spatio-temporal mapping.
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| 10. |
- Han, Mengjie, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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Generating hourly electricity demand data for large-scale single-family buildings by a decomposition-recombination method
- 2022
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Ingår i: Energy and Built Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 2666-1233.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Household electricity demand has substantial impacts on local grid operation, energy storage and the energy performance of buildings. Hourly demand data at district or urban level helps stakeholders understand the demand patterns from a granular time scale and provides robust evidence in energy management. However, such type of data is often expensive and time-consuming to collect, process and integrate. Decisions built upon smart meter data have to deal with challenges of privacy and security in the whole process. Incomplete data due to confidentiality concerns or system failure can further increase the difficulty of modeling and optimization. In addition, methods using historical data to make predictions can largely vary depending on data quality, local building environment, and dynamic factors. Considering these challenges, this paper proposes a statistical method to generate hourly electricity demand data for large-scale single-family buildings by decomposing time series data and recombining them into synthetics. The proposed method used public data to capture seasonality and the distribution of residuals that fulfill statistical characteristics. A reference building was used to provide empirical parameter settings and validations for the studied buildings. An illustrative case in a city of Sweden using only annual total demand was presented for deploying the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed method can mimic reality well and represent a high level of similarity to the real data. The average monthly error for the best month reached 15.9% and the best one was below 10% among 11 tested months. Less than 0.6% improper synthetic values were found in the studied region.
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