Nghiem, Truong
Email Address
ORCID
Disciplines
Control Theory
Controls and Control Theory
Dynamics and Dynamical Systems
Energy Systems
Power and Energy
Controls and Control Theory
Dynamics and Dynamical Systems
Energy Systems
Power and Energy
relationships.isProjectOf
relationships.isOrgUnitOf
Position
Faculty Member
Introduction
Research Interests
Collection
16 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 16
Publication Scalable Scheduling of Building Control Systems for Peak Demand Reduction(2012-06-15) Nghiem, Truong; Behl, Madhur; Mangharam, Rahul; Pappas, GeorgeIn large energy systems, peak demand might cause severe issues such as service disruption and high cost of energy production and distribution. Under the widely adopted peak-demand pricing policy, electricity customers are charged a very high price for their maximum demand to discourage their energy usage in peak load conditions. In buildings, peak demand is often the result of temporally correlated energy demand surges caused by uncoordinated operation of sub-systems such as heating, ventilating, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVAC&R) systems and lighting systems. We have previously presented green scheduling as an approach to schedule the building control systems within a constrained peak demand envelope while ensuring that custom climate conditions are facilitated. This paper provides a sufficient schedulability condition for the peak constraint to be realizable for a large and practical class of system dynamics that can capture certain nonlinear dynamics, inter-dependencies, and constrained disturbances. We also present a method for synthesizing periodic schedules for the system. The proposed method is demonstrated in a simulation example to be scalable and effective for a large-scale system.Publication Peak Power Reduction in Hybrid Energy Systems with Limited Load Forecasts(2014-03-18) Pant, Yash Vardhan; Nghiem, Truong X; Mangharam, RahulHybrid energy systems, which consist of a load powered by a source and a form of energy storage, find applications in many systems, e.g., the electric grid and electric vehicles. A key problem for hybrid energy systems is the reduction of peak power consumption to ensure cost-efficient operation as peak power draws require additional resources and adversely affect the system reliability and lifetime. Furthermore, in some cases such as electric vehicles, the load dynamics are fast, not perfectly known in advance and the on-board computation power is often limited, making the implementation of traditional optimal control difficult. We aim to develop a control scheme to reduce the peak power drawn from the source for hybrid energy systems with limited computation power and limited load forecasts. We propose a scheme with two control levels and provide a sufficient condition for control of the different energy storage/generation components to meet the instantaneous load while satisfying a peak power threshold. The scheme provides performance comparable to Model Predictive Control, while requiring less computation power and only coarse-grained load predictions. For a case study, we implement the scheme for a battery-supercapacitor-powered electric vehicle with real world drive cycles to demonstrate the low execution time and effective reduction of the battery power (hence temperature), which is crucial to the lifetime of the battery.Publication Event-based Green Scheduling of Radiant Systems in Buildings(2013-03-01) Nghiem, Truong X; Pappas, George; Mangharam, RahulThis paper looks at the problem of peak power demand reduction for intermittent operation of radiant systems in buildings. Uncoordinated operation of the circulation pumps of a multi-zone hydronic radiant system can cause temporally correlated electricity demand surges when multiple pumps are activated simultaneously. Under a demand-based electricity pricing policy, this uncoordinated behavior can result in high electricity costs and expensive system operation. We have previously presented Green Scheduling with the periodic scheduling approach for reducing the peak power demand of electric radiant heating systems while maintaining indoor thermal comfort. This paper develops an event-based state feedback scheduling strategy that, unlike periodic scheduling, directly takes into account the disturbances and is thus more suitable for building systems. The effectiveness of the new strategy is demonstrated through simulation in MATLAB.Publication Green Scheduling for Energy-Efficient Operation of Multiple Chiller Plants(2012-10-01) Behl, Madhur; Nghiem, Truong; Mangharam, RahulIn large building systems, such as a university campus, the air-conditioning systems are commonly served by chiller plants, which contribute a large fraction of the total electricity consumption of the campuses. The power consumption of a chiller is highly affected by its Coefficient of Performance (COP), which is optimal when the chiller is operated at or near full load. For a chiller plant, its overall COP can be optimized by utilizing a Thermal Energy Storage (TES) and switching its operation between COP-optimal charging and discharging modes. However, uncoordinated mode switchings of chiller plants may cause temporally-correlated high electricity demand when multiple plants are charging their TES concurrently. In this technical report, a Green Scheduling approach, proposed in our previous work, is used to schedule the chiller plants to reduce their peak aggregate power demand while ensuring safe operation of the TES. We present a scheduling algorithm based on backward reach set computation of the TES dynamics. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated in a numerical simulation in Matlab to be effective for reducing the peak power demand and the overall electricity cost.Publication Co-Design of Anytime Computation and Robust Control(2015-01-01) Pant, Yash Vardhan; Mohta, Kartik; Abbas, Houssam; Nghiem, Truong; Deveitti, Joesph; Mangharam, RahulPublication Green Scheduling for Radiant Systems in Buildings(2012-10-01) Nghiem, Truong X; Behl, Madhur; Pappas, George J.; Mangharam, RahulIn this report we look at the problem of peak power reduction for buildings with electric radiant floor heating systems. Uncoordinated operation of a multi-zone radiant floor heating system can result in temporally correlated electricity demand surges or peaks in the building’s electricity consumption. As peak power prices are 200-400 times that of the nominal rate, this uncoordinated activity can result in high electricity costs and expensive system operation. We have previously presented green scheduling as an approach for reducing the aggregate peak power consumption in buildings while ensuring that indoor thermal comfort is always maintained. This report extends the theoretical results for general affine dynamical systems and applies them to electric radiant floor heating systems. The potential of the proposed method in reducing the peak power demand is demonstrated for a small-scale system through simulation in EnergyPlus and for a large-scale system through simulation in Matlab.Publication IMpACT: Inverse Model Accuracy and Control Performance Toolbox for Buildings(2014-03-01) Behl, Madhur; Nghiem, Truong X; Mangharam, RahulUncertainty affects all aspects of building performance: from the identification of models, through the implementation of model-based control, to the operation of the deployed systems. Learning models of buildings from sensor data has a fundamental property that the model can only be as accurate and reliable as the data on which it was trained. For small and medium size buildings, a low-cost method for model capture is necessary to take advantage of optimal model-based supervisory control schemes. We present IMpACT, a methodology and a toolbox for analysis of uncertainty propagation for building inverse modeling and controls. Given a plant model and real input data, IMpACT automatically evaluates the effect of the uncertainty propagation from sensor data to model accuracy and control performance. We also present a statistical method to quantify the bias in the sensor measurement and to determine near optimal sensor placement and density for accurate signal measurements. In our previous work, we considered the end-to-end propagation of uncertainty in the form of fixed bias in the sensor data. In this paper, we extend the method to work with random errors in the sensor data, which is more realistic. Using a real building test-bed, we show how performing an uncertainty analysis can reveal trends about inverse model accuracy and control performance, which can be used to make informed decisions about sensor requirements and data accuracy.Publication Green Scheduling of Control Systems for Peak Demand Reduction(2011-12-01) Nghiem, Truong X; Behl, Madhur; Mangharam, Rahul; Pappas, George JBuilding systems such as heating, air quality control and refrigeration operate independently of each other and frequently result in temporally correlated energy demand surges. As peak power prices are 200-400 times that of the nominal rate, this uncoordinated activity is both expensive and operationally inefficient. We present an approach to fine-grained coordination of energy demand by scheduling the control systems within a constrained peak while ensuring custom climate environments are facilitated. The peak constraint is minimized for energy efficiency, while we provide feasibility conditions for the constraint to be realizable by a scheduling policy for the control systems. The physical systems are then coordinated by the scheduling controller so as both the peak constraint and the climate/safety constraint are satisfied. We also introduce a simple scheduling approach called lazy scheduling. The proposed control and scheduling strategy is implemented in simulation examples from small to large scales, which show that it can achieve significant peak demand reduction while being efficient and scalable.Publication On the Feasibility of Linear Discrete-Time Systems of the Green Scheduling Problem(2011-11-01) Nghiem, Truong; Li, Zheng; Behl, Madhur; Huang, Pei-Chi; Pappas, George; Mok, Aloysius K.; Mangharam, RahulPeak power consumption of buildings in large facilities like hospitals and universities becomes a big issue because peak prices are much higher than normal rates. During a power demand surge an automated power controller of a building may need to schedule ON and OFF different environment actuators such as heaters and air quality control while maintaining the state variables such as temperature or air quality of any room within comfortable ranges. The green scheduling problem asks whether a scheduling policy is possible for a system and what is the necessary and sufficient condition for systems to be feasible. In this paper we study the feasibility of the green scheduling problem for HVAC(Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning) systems which are approximated by a discrete-time model with constant increasing and decreasing rates of the state variables. We first investigate the systems consisting of two tasks and find the analytical form of the necessary and sufficient conditions for such systems to be feasible under certain assumptions. Then we present our algorithmic solution for general systems of more than 2 tasks. Given the increasing and decreasing rates of the tasks, our algorithm returns a subset of the state space such that the system is feasible if and only if the initial state is in this subset. With the knowledge of that subset, a scheduling policy can be computed on the fly as the system runs, with the flexibility to add power-saving, priority-based or fair sub-policies.Publication Peak Power Control of Battery and Super-capacitor Energy Systems in Electric Vehicles(2014-02-01) Pant, Yash Vardhan; Nghiem, Truong X; Mangharam, RahulHybrid energy systems consist of a load powered by a source and a form of energy storage. Systems with mixed energy supply find applications in the electric grid with renewable and non-renewable sources, in mission critical systems such as Mars rovers with rechargeable and non-rechargeable batteries and low-power monitoring systems with energy harvesting. A general problem for hybrid energy systems is the reduction of peak power consumption to ensure cost-efficient operation as peak power draws require additional resources, adversely affect the system reliability and storage lifetime. Furthermore, in some cases such as electric vehicles, the load dynamics are fast, not perfectly known a priori and the computation power available is often limited, making the implementation of traditional optimal control difficult. This paper aims to develop a control scheme to reduce the peak power drawn from the source for hybrid energy systems with limited computation power and limited load forecasts. We propose a scheme with two control levels and provide a sufficient condition for control of the different energy storage/generation components to meet the instantaneous load while satisfying a peak power threshold. The scheme provides performance comparable to Model Predictive Control, while requiring less computation power and only coarse-grained load predictions. As a case study we implement the scheme for a battery-supercapacitor system in an electric vehicle with real world drive cycles to demonstrate the low execution time and effective reduction of the battery power (hence temperature), which is crucial to the lifetime of the battery.