English

Adaptive Robust Data-driven Building Control via Bi-level Reformulation: an Experimental Result

Systems and Control 2023-03-23 v3 Systems and Control

Abstract

Data-driven control approaches for the minimization of energy consumption of buildings have the potential to significantly reduce deployment costs and increase uptake of advanced control in this sector. A number of recent approaches based on the application of Willems' fundamental lemma for data-driven controller design from input/output measurements are very promising for deterministic LTI systems. This paper \change{proposes a systematic way to handle unknown measurement noise and measurable process noise}, and extends these data-driven control schemes to adaptive building control via a robust bi-level formulation, whose upper level ensures robustness and whose lower level guarantees prediction quality. Corresponding numerical improvements and an active excitation mechanism are proposed to enable a computationally efficient reliable operation. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is validated by \change{a multi-zone building simulation} and a real-world experiment on a single-zone conference building on the EPFL campus. The real-world experiment includes a 20-day non-stop test, where, without extra modeling effort, our proposed controller improves 18.4\% energy efficiency against an industry-standard controller, while also robustly ensuring occupant comfort.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.05740,
  title  = {Adaptive Robust Data-driven Building Control via Bi-level Reformulation: an Experimental Result},
  author = {Yingzhao Lian and Jicheng Shi and Manuel Koch and Colin Neil Jones},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.05740},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T03:03:28.565Z