A control strategy for district energy management

This paper deals with the District Energy Management problem by proposing the hierarchical control architecture and a suitable control strategy for the energy governance of a district of public office buildings. The District Energy Management System (DEMS) provides energy for the building network on the basis of the Day-Ahead Energy Market rules. Moreover, it monitors the district power consumption and interacts with the Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) to optimize the power consumption the day-ahead, by respecting the user's comfort preferences and minimizing the costs. Two optimization models are formulated for both building and district energy management. The first optimization is performed by the BEMS and pursues the objective of satisfying the thermal comfort by minimizing the power cost function. The second optimization is performed by the DEMS in order to minimize the district power cost by appropriately balancing the penalties and rewards. © 2015 IEEE.