Physics-constrained deep learning of multi-zone building thermal dynamics

We present a physics-constrained deep learning method to develop control-oriented models of building thermal dynamics. The proposed method uses systematic encoding of physics-based prior knowledge into a structured recurrent neural architecture. Specifically, our method incorporates structural prior knowledge from traditional physics-based building modeling into the architecture of the deep neural network model. Further, we also use penalty methods to provide inequality constraints, thereby bounding predictions within physically realistic and safe operating ranges. We observe that stable eigenvalues accurately characterize the dissipativeness of the system, and use a constrained matrix parameterization based on the Perron-Frobenius theorem to bound the dominant eigenvalues of the building thermal model parameter matrices. We demonstrate the effectiveness and physical interpretability of the proposed data-driven modeling approach on a real-world dataset obtained from an office building with 20 thermal zones. The proposed data-driven method can learn interpretable dynamical models that achieve high accuracy and generalization over long-term prediction horizons. We show that using only 10 days' measurements for training, our method is capable of generalizing over 20 consecutive days. We demonstrate that the proposed modeling methodology is achieving state-of-the-art performance by significantly improving the accuracy and generalization compared to classical system identification methods and prior advanced methods reported in the literature. compared to prior state-of-the-art methods reported in the literature. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/).