Campus-wide integrated building energy simulation

Effective energy management for large campus facilitie is becoming increasingly complex as modern hearing and cooling systems comprise of several hundred subsystem interconnected to each other. Building energy simulator like EnergyPlus are exceedingly good at modeling a singl building equipped with a standalone HVAC equipment However, the ability to simulate a large campus and to control the dynamics and interactions of the subsystem is limited or missing altogether. In this paper, we use the Matlab-EnergyPlus MLE+ too 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.