An Efficient Evolutionary Approach to Parameter Identification in a Building Thermal Model

Thermal models of buildings are often used to identify energy savings within a building. Given that a significant proportion of that energy is typically used to maintain building temperature, establishing the optimal control of the buildings thermal system is important. This requires an understanding of the thermal dynamics of the building, which is often obtained from physical thermal models. However, these models require detailed building parameters to be specified and these can often be difficult to determine. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary approach to parameter identification for thermal models that are formulated as an optimization task. A state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm, i.e., SaNSDE+, has been developed. A fitness function is defined, which quantifies the difference between the energy-consumption time-series data that are derived from the identified parameters and that given by simulation with a set of predetermined target model parameters. In comparison with a conventional genetic algorithm, fast evolutionary programming, and two state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms, our experimental results show that the proposed SaNSDE+ has significantly improved both the solution quality and the convergence speed, suggesting this is an effective tool for parameter identification for simulated building thermal models.