Robust Building Energy Load Forecasting Using Physically-Based Kernel Models
Robust and accurate building energy load forecasting is important for helping building managers and utilities to plan, budget, and strategize energy resources in advance. With recent prevalent adoption of smart-meters in buildings, a significant amount of building energy consumption data became avai...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MDPI AG
2018-04-01
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| Series: | Energies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/4/862 |
| _version_ | 1818036101661589504 |
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| author | Anand Krishnan Prakash Susu Xu Ram Rajagopal Hae Young Noh |
| author_facet | Anand Krishnan Prakash Susu Xu Ram Rajagopal Hae Young Noh |
| author_sort | Anand Krishnan Prakash |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Robust and accurate building energy load forecasting is important for helping building managers and utilities to plan, budget, and strategize energy resources in advance. With recent prevalent adoption of smart-meters in buildings, a significant amount of building energy consumption data became available. Many studies have developed physics-based white box models and data-driven black box models to predict building energy consumption; however, they require extensive prior knowledge about building system, need a large set of training data, or lack robustness to different forecasting scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a new building energy forecasting method based on Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) that incorporates physical insights about load data characteristics to improve accuracy while reducing training requirements. The GPR is a non-parametric regression method that models the data as a joint Gaussian distribution with mean and covariance functions and forecast using the Bayesian updating. We model the covariance function of the GPR to reflect the data patterns in different forecasting horizon scenarios, as prior knowledge. Our method takes advantage of the modeling flexibility and computational efficiency of the GPR while benefiting from the physical insights to further improve the training efficiency and accuracy. We evaluate our method with three field datasets from two university campuses (Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University) for both short- and long-term load forecasting. The results show that our method performs more accurately, especially when the training dataset is small, compared to other state-of-the-art forecasting models (up to 2.95 times smaller prediction error). |
| first_indexed | 2024-12-10T07:05:36Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-08d2a2ad932b41baa649eb56bac466c5 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1996-1073 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-12-10T07:05:36Z |
| publishDate | 2018-04-01 |
| publisher | MDPI AG |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Energies |
| spelling | doaj.art-08d2a2ad932b41baa649eb56bac466c52022-12-22T01:58:11ZengMDPI AGEnergies1996-10732018-04-0111486210.3390/en11040862en11040862Robust Building Energy Load Forecasting Using Physically-Based Kernel ModelsAnand Krishnan Prakash0Susu Xu1Ram Rajagopal2Hae Young Noh3Energy Science, Technology and Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USADepartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USADepartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USADepartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USARobust and accurate building energy load forecasting is important for helping building managers and utilities to plan, budget, and strategize energy resources in advance. With recent prevalent adoption of smart-meters in buildings, a significant amount of building energy consumption data became available. Many studies have developed physics-based white box models and data-driven black box models to predict building energy consumption; however, they require extensive prior knowledge about building system, need a large set of training data, or lack robustness to different forecasting scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a new building energy forecasting method based on Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) that incorporates physical insights about load data characteristics to improve accuracy while reducing training requirements. The GPR is a non-parametric regression method that models the data as a joint Gaussian distribution with mean and covariance functions and forecast using the Bayesian updating. We model the covariance function of the GPR to reflect the data patterns in different forecasting horizon scenarios, as prior knowledge. Our method takes advantage of the modeling flexibility and computational efficiency of the GPR while benefiting from the physical insights to further improve the training efficiency and accuracy. We evaluate our method with three field datasets from two university campuses (Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University) for both short- and long-term load forecasting. The results show that our method performs more accurately, especially when the training dataset is small, compared to other state-of-the-art forecasting models (up to 2.95 times smaller prediction error).http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/4/862building energy load forecastingGaussian Process RegressionKernel ModelHVAC loadlighting load |
| spellingShingle | Anand Krishnan Prakash Susu Xu Ram Rajagopal Hae Young Noh Robust Building Energy Load Forecasting Using Physically-Based Kernel Models Energies building energy load forecasting Gaussian Process Regression Kernel Model HVAC load lighting load |
| title | Robust Building Energy Load Forecasting Using Physically-Based Kernel Models |
| title_full | Robust Building Energy Load Forecasting Using Physically-Based Kernel Models |
| title_fullStr | Robust Building Energy Load Forecasting Using Physically-Based Kernel Models |
| title_full_unstemmed | Robust Building Energy Load Forecasting Using Physically-Based Kernel Models |
| title_short | Robust Building Energy Load Forecasting Using Physically-Based Kernel Models |
| title_sort | robust building energy load forecasting using physically based kernel models |
| topic | building energy load forecasting Gaussian Process Regression Kernel Model HVAC load lighting load |
| url | http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/4/862 |
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