An optimization-based approach for facility energy management with uncertainties

Effective energy management for facilities is becoming increasingly important. This paper presents an energy management model and the corresponding methodology to control HVAC equipment a key electricity consumption apparatus. The problem is to minimize the energy and demand costs while satisfying human comfort and other requirements in a stochastic setting. How to solve this non-separable integer optimization problem and how to handle uncertainties are major challenges. An advanced method that combines Lagrangian relaxation and stochastic dynamic programming is developed. Numerical testing results show that the method can effectively handle uncertainties and is significantly better than a few selected heuristics.