LightMBC-tool: a web-based platform to support industrial HVAC system energy efficiency

Industrial buildings account for a significant portion of global building energy consumption and carbon emissions. With the rapid growth of the manufacturing industry, a widely recognized opportunity to reduce energy consumption in industrial buildings is to improve the energy efficiency of HVAC systems in manufacturing factories. Due to the requirement of temperature control and humidity control (if any), one characteristic of HVAC system models for industrial buildings is the high requirement of computational efficiency in system modeling for real-time control applications. However, most of the existing MPC tools have been developed for small to medium-scale commercial, residential and office buildings, and the system models are usually fully-coupled, which has led to their limited progress in large-scale industrial buildings. This paper provides an overview of the LightMBC (Model-Based Control) web-based platform toolkit for optimal control of HVAC systems in industrial buildings to achieve energy savings, including a practical web-based graphical user interface. The strength of LightMBC lies in the fact that it is based on decoupled, step-wise Modelica-based models of the water-side system, distribution pipe network and demand-side systems (air-side systems and workshop), performs for-loop specified range traversal optimization to provide real-time optimal control parameter combinations of pumps and chillers. The technical details of the parametric modeling module, the model calibration module, and the control optimization module, as well as a case study developed in a real manufacturing factory are documented. The validation results showed that the proposed method could reduce energy consumption by 26.35% for pumps and 29.01% for chiller units during typical cooling seasons under the premise that the indoor temperature is controlled, demonstrating the significant potential of the proposed method for improving energy efficiency.