Data-Driven Modeling, Control and Tools for Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Demand response (DR) is becoming important as the volatility on the grid continues to increase. Current DR approaches are either completely manual or involve deriving first principles based models which are extremely cost and time prohibitive to build. We consider the problem of data-driven DR for large buildings which involves predicting the demand response baseline, evaluating fixed DR strategies and synthesizing DR control actions. We provide a model based control with regression trees algorithm (mbCRT), which allows us to perform closed-loop control for DR strategy synthesis for large buildings. Our data-driven control synthesis algorithm outperforms rule-based DR by 17% for a large DoE commercial reference building and leads to a curtailment of 380kW and over $45,000 in savings. Our methods have been integrated into an open source tool called DR-Advisor, which acts as a recommender system for the building's facilities manager and provides suitable control actions to meet the desired load curtailment while maintaining operations and maximizing the economic reward. DR-Advisor achieves 92.8% to 98.9% prediction accuracy for 8 buildings on Penn's campus. We compare DR-Advisor with other data driven methods and rank 2nd on ASHRAE's benchmarking data-set for energy prediction.