Microgrid Oriented Modeling Of Space Heating System Based On Neural Networks

Balancing the energy production and consumption is a huge challenge for future smart grids. In this context, many demand-side management programs are being developed to achieve flexibility from different loads like space heating. As space heating models for flexibility simulations are an interdisciplinary field of work, complex civil engineering thermal models need to be combined with complex electrical engineering control simulations in different software frameworks. Traditionally used methods have shortcomings in one of those two domains as the publications that provide complex control strategies for demand response are lacking complex thermal models and vice versa. Co-simulations overcome this problem but are computationally expensive and have compatibility limitations. Thus, the aim of this work is to develop a methodology for designing space heating/cooling models, intended for positive energy district- or smart city simulations, which provide high accuracy at low computational expense. This could be achieved by synthesizing neural network object models from IDA-ICE civil engineering models in Matlab. These machine learning models showed improvements of more than 30% in different error metrics and a simulation time reduction of more than 80% compared to other methods, making them suitable for use in microgrid simulations, including flexibility analyses.