Campus-Wide Integrated Building Energy Simulation

Effective energy management for large campus facilities is becoming increasingly complex as modern heating and cooling systems comprise of several hundred subsystems interconnected to each other. Building energy simulators like EnergyPlus are exceedingly good at modeling a single building equipped with a standalone HVAC equipment. However, the ability to simulate a large campus and to control the dynamics and interactions of the subsystems is limited or missing altogether. In this paper, we use the Matlab-EnergyPlus MLE+ tool we developed, to extend the capability of EnergyPlus to co-simulate a campus with multiple buildings connected to a chilled water distribution to a central chiller plant with control systems in Matlab. We present the details of how this simulation can be set-up and implemented using MLE+'s Matlab/Simulink block. We utilize the virtual campus test-bed to evaluate the performance of several demand response strategies. We also describe a coordinated demand response scheme which can lead to load curtailment during a demand response event while minimizing thermal discomfort.