Abstract
Due to the impact of occupants’ activities in buildings, the relationship between electricity demand and ambient temperature will show different trends in the long-term and short-term, which show seasonal variation and hourly variation, respectively. This makes it difficult for conventional data fitting methods to accurately predict the long-term and short-term power demand of buildings at the same time. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes two approaches for fitting and predicting the electricity demand of office buildings. The first proposed approach splits the electricity demand data into fixed time periods, containing working hours and non-working hours, to reduce the impact of occupants’ activities. After finding the most sensitive weather variable to non-working hour electricity demand, the building baseload and occupant activities can be predicted separately. The second proposed approach uses the artificial neural network (ANN) and fuzzy logic techniques to fit the building baseload, peak load, and occupancy rate with multi-variables of weather variables. In this approach, the power demand data is split into a narrower time range as no-occupancy hours, full-occupancy hours, and fuzzy hours between them, in which the occupancy rate is varying depending on the time and weather variables. The proposed approaches are verified by the real data from the University of Glasgow as a case study. The simulation results show that, compared with the traditional ANN method, both proposed approaches have less root-mean-square-error (RMSE) in predicting electricity demand. In addition, the proposed working and non-working hour based regression approach reduces the average RMSE by 35%, while the ANN with fuzzy hours based approach reduces the average RMSE by 42%, comparing with the traditional power demand prediction method. In addition, the second proposed approach can provide more information for building energy management, including the predicted baseload, peak load, and occupancy rate, without requiring additional building parameters.
Highlights
Due to the environmental degradation and global warming, many countries aim to develop low-carbon technologies to reduce the con sumption of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions [1, 2]
Wei et al proposed an occupancy estimation method based on blind system identification (BSI), and estimated the number of occupants based on artificial neural networks and using BSI and developed and reported a power consumption pre diction model for air conditioning systems [14]
The proposed Approach 2 can reduce RMSE by 5% to 30% compared with the pro posed Approach 1, and it reduces RMSE by 30% to 55% compared with the conventional artificial neural network (ANN)
Summary
Due to the environmental degradation and global warming, many countries aim to develop low-carbon technologies to reduce the con sumption of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions [1, 2]. Wei et al proposed an occupancy estimation method based on blind system identification (BSI), and estimated the number of occupants based on artificial neural networks and using BSI and developed and reported a power consumption pre diction model for air conditioning systems [14] These methods are suitable for long-term forecasting of average daily electricity demand to reduce the impact of personnel activities on forecast accuracy, or for short-term forecasting of electricity demand to reduce seasonal effects. The proposed prediction method can predict the hourly power demand of target buildings based on the prediction results of baseload and occupants’ activities from ANN This method was applied in the University of Glasgow campus as a case study. The results show that the proposed ANN-based method can significantly reduce the prediction error, improve the prediction accu racy of the electrical demand of the target buildings and the entire campus
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