Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/rser

Data-driven predictive control for unlocking building energy flexibility:

A review
Anjukan Kathirgamanathan a, b, *, Mattia De Rosa a, b, Eleni Mangina b, c, Donal P. Finn a, b
a
School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University College Dublin, Ireland
b
UCD Energy Institute, O’Brien Centre for Science, University College Dublin, Ireland
c
School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Managing supply and demand in the electricity grid is becoming more challenging due to the increasing pene­
Review tration of variable renewable energy sources. As significant end-use consumers, and through better grid inte­
Building energy flexibility gration, buildings are expected to play an expanding role in the future smart grid. Predictive control allows
Data-driven
buildings to better harness available energy flexibility from the building passive thermal mass. However, due to
Machine learning
Model predictive control (MPC)
the heterogeneous nature of the building stock, developing computationally tractable control-oriented models,
Smart grid which adequately represent the complex and nonlinear thermal-dynamics of individual buildings, is proving to
be a major hurdle. Data-driven predictive control, coupled with the “Internet of Things”, holds the promise for a
scalable and transferrable approach, with data-driven models replacing traditional physics-based models. This
review examines recent work utilising data-driven predictive control for demand side management application
with a special focus on the nexus of model development and control integration, which to date, previous reviews
have not addressed. Further topics examined include the practical requirements for harnessing passive thermal
mass and the issue of feature selection. Current research gaps are outlined and future research pathways are
suggested to identify the most promising data-driven predictive control techniques for grid integration of
buildings.

1. Introduction
1.1. The importance of building energy flexibility in the smart grid
Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are intrinsically
variable by nature and this creates a stability issue for the grid with the
fluctuating supply needing to be balanced with demand [1]. In their
review of the future of the low-carbon electricity grid [2], review such
conventional renewable energy technologies. They suggest that these
technologies alone do not represent an ideal solution and that grid
integration is required in conjunction to deliver a reliable and robust
electricity system [3]. Focus on the impacts of large amounts of wind
power on the design and operation of power systems. Similarly [4],
address the same question and barriers with large penetrations of solar
photovoltaics [5]. Summarise some of the challenges faced by this new
power system and the need for new flexibility products and markets. The
flexibility to manage any mismatch can come from either the supply side
(through the use of dedicated conventional power plants or storage) or
from the demand side [1,6]. Demand Side Management (DSM) is one
such grid integration strategy and can be broadly categorised as actions
that influence the quantity, patterns of use or the primary source of
energy consumed by end users [7]. Demand Response (DR) is one
promising facet of DSM where consumers curtail or shift their electricity
usage in response to financial or other incentives. Within DR, there are
different strategies based on the response times, services offered and
business models [8].
With buildings representing about 40% of the total primary energy
consumption in Europe [9], they are very relevant to participation in DR
and the provision of energy flexibility. Further, the thermal mass of
buildings allows them to be used as a thermal energy storage making
them potentially very useful in DSM [10]. Commercial buildings are of
particular interest given their greater thermal mass and common usage
of space conditioning. This is often through the use of heating, ventila­
tion and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and this HVAC load is one
such load that can be shifted using the thermal mass of the building.
These HVAC systems are often integrated with Building Automation

* Corresponding author. School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University College Dublin, Ireland.
E-mail address: anjukan.kathirgamanathan@ucdconnect.ie (A. Kathirgamanathan).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2020.110120
Received 27 January 2020; Received in revised form 15 July 2020; Accepted 19 July 2020
Available online 9 August 2020
1364-0321/© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
Systems (BAS) or Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) which
can be used to automate DR measures. These systems are also capable of
receiving signals directly from the electricity grid [11]. Buildings may
often also possess active thermal storage, active electric storage (batte­
ries), indirect electric storage (Electric Vehicles (EVs)) and on-site gen­
eration as further sources of energy flexibility.
DR programs can be categorised as being either price or incentive
based [12]. Incentive-based programmes pay customers (end-users) to
shift their electricity consumption at times requested by grid operators.
Grid operators can be either Distribution System Operators (DSO), who
are generally responsible for the operation of the low-voltage distribu­
tion system and delivery of power to the end consumers; or Transmission
System Operators (TSO), who are responsible for the operation of the
high-voltage transmission system and ensuring its stability. Generally, a
building is required to be capable of meeting a minimum required
reduction in power consumption. While individual buildings may not be
capable of meeting this reduction, aggregators are a market actor who
contract with these buildings and combine the available power reduc­
tion and offer this to the grid operator, receiving a percentage of the
value to the grid operator created by applying the DSM measure [13].
Given that energy flexibility is a resource that is aggregated from many
buildings, which are all unique in the way that they are constructed,
designed and operated, a scalable and transferrable method of assessing
and harnessing this energy flexibility is required.
1.2. Approaches to assess and harness building energy flexibility
Approaches to assess and harness energy flexibility generally require
as input; data, a model and a control framework. For example, a model
capturing the thermal dynamics of the building and its heating or
cooling system is often required to ensure that the thermal comfort of
the occupants is not compromised due to shifting the HVAC load for
DSM purposes [14]. A control framework is required to actuate the
building energy systems appropriately to ensure that the performance
objectives of the energy systems are met [15].
Although the optimal control of a HVAC system is a complex multi-
variable problem, there has been increased focus in literature recently
for control strategies such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) in build­
ings. However, the standard control seen in most buildings today is
simple Rule-Based Control (RBC) [16]. RBC is often outperformed by
MPC which is predictive in nature and hence able to take future dis­
turbances (e.g., grid or weather signal) into account. Moreover, MPC can
harness the building thermal storage characteristics by predicting the
building thermal behaviour evolution [17,18]. MPC control requires a
linear model (convex optimisation problem) if an unique solution is to
be guaranteed - although some studies have considered highly nonlinear
building models for MPC as well [19,20]. A fully linear model is often
not feasible with buildings, especially if they include ventilation models
where bi-linearities are introduced due to modelling the product of
temperature and mass flow rate [21]. The challenges of generating a
suitable and accurate model are one of the most significant limitations of
MPC and have led to MPC largely being constrained to the research field
to date [22,23]. In fact, in their study of implementing MPC in a typical
Swiss office building [22], concluded that deploying MPC had too high a
cost relative to the operating cost savings given the energy prices at that
time and tools available for model development.
The challenges around the implementation of MPC have led re­
searchers to investigate data-driven approaches where the predictive
capability of MPC is retained without the expense of first principle based
model generation. One of the challenges with black-box models is that
they are often unsuitable for integration with control as the models are
generally highly non-linear which adds additional computational
complexity to the MPC problem [24]. Several techniques have been used
to mitigate these issues, e.g., using separation of manipulated control
and non-manipulated disturbance variables [25] and using branch and
bound techniques on a discrete search space [26]. A few terms have
2
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
appeared in the literature for the model and control method, where the
controller is designed by directly using online or offline input/output
data from the controlled system rather than starting from a first prin­
ciples based model [27]. Coined the term ‘DPC’ (Data Predictive Con­
trol) in their work whereas other literature uses the term ‘DDC’
(Data-Driven Control) [28]. As the field of treating buildings as
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a very new area of research, there has
been little research in terms of comparing these different techniques
(apart from Ref. [29] in terms of energy efficiency).
1.3. Previous reviews
There have been several review papers that have looked at the
various data-driven approaches employed in building energy manage­
ment [30]. and [31] provide review papers that look solely at the
problem of predicting electricity consumption [32]. Provides a similar
review with the problem treated as a time series forecasting one. A state
of the art review on data-driven modeling of building thermal dynamics
is provided by Ref. [33]. Whilst these studies did not consider the control
problem [28], provide a survey and classification of ‘DDC’, although the
focus was not on the building domain. The review of [34] investigates
the HVAC control problem with a focus on data-driven models. They
define the main aspects of the building climate problem, summarised
succinctly as; large sampling periods, low-quality measurements,
operations-critical (operating envelopes constrained by building occu­
pancy and thermal comfort requirements) and difficult modelling. There
have been several review papers focusing exclusively on MPC for
building energy management applications; studies looking at the theory
and applications of MPC in building HVAC systems [35], a review with
regards to presenting a unified framework [24] and several works
reviewing building control systems and modelling techniques from a
broader perspective [36–38]. [37] Provide a review of optimised control
systems for energy management in buildings. However, these reviews do
not consider the applicability of such control systems for meeting the
energy flexibility needs of the smart grid. Those that have are not
focused on data-driven approaches, e.g., the review of assessment and
control of DR programmes in a residential context [39] or are focused on
a particular technique only, such as the work of [40] on Reinforcement
Learning.
1.4. Motivation
Given that the generation and identification of a suitable control-
oriented model of the thermal dynamics of a building is considered to
be one of the most significant hurdles in the implementation of predic­
tive control in building energy systems, this is also one of the biggest
limitations in unlocking energy flexibility potential in building stock.
This justifies a literature review of existing data-driven approaches, with
this paper aiming to address the following research gaps:
1. Although different data-driven predictive control techniques have
emerged in recent years, no systematic evaluation of the applica­
bility or the suitability of any of these techniques to address the DSM
problem in buildings has been carried out to date.
2. The practical requirements of the building passive thermal mass
control-oriented model for harnessing the inherent energy flexibility
continues to be not well understood.
3. The type of input features used for training data-driven modelling
and control frameworks for DSM in buildings has received little
attention in the literature.
With these research gaps in mind, this review provides the following
contributions and novelty by:
1. Giving a holistic overview and categorisation of the variety of data-
driven predictive approaches used in building energy management
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
and DSM, with a focus on the building passive thermal mass and the
modelling of the associated dynamics, which from a subject
perspective is novel in a survey.
2. Providing insights on the coupling of system models and control
integration by means of a qualitative analysis of the approaches used
and their suitability in the context of a building energy flexibility
problem, which to date has not been addressed in literature.
3. Assessing emerging techniques to address the challenge of feature
selection in the context of the availability of ubiquitous data from
building energy management systems, where a paucity of reviews
exist to date.
The broader application of this study is understanding the data-
driven techniques most suitable for predictive control in building en­
ergy systems, whilst being scalable and transferable between buildings.
To give a few examples of potential applications, for the end-user (i.e.,
building energy manager and/or operator), such applications may
facilitate participation in DR programmes, supporting energy efficiency
efforts and reducing the carbon footprint of the building. For aggre­
gators, possible applications include the facilitation of direct control of
their building portfolio for DSM and assessing the flexibility potential of
their portfolio.
The paper is organised as follows: Section 2 provides essential
background to the concept of building energy flexibility, and identifies
the models and control techniques used for building energy manage­
ment. Section 3 presents the methodology used in the current review to
compile the studies that are investigated and to categorise the studies.
Section 4 presents a classification table of the reviewed studies sum­
marising key information such as the type of control, type of model,
application of the study with a particular focus on energy flexibility
applications. Visualisations are also provided illustrating trends evident
from the review and further analysis is provided where relevant. Section
5 provides a discussion of the key findings, Section 6 gives the conclu­
sions and Section 7 summarises potential future research directions to
enable and enhance the further use of data-driven predictive control for
building energy flexibility applications.
2. Background
2.1. Demand side management and building energy flexibility
In the scope of this review, it is first useful to provide a formal
definition of building energy flexibility. The International Energy
Agency (IEA) Energy in Buildings and Communities Program (EBC)
Annex 67 is dedicated to the issue of building energy flexibility [13]. The
Annex gives the definition as “The Energy Flexibility of a building is the
ability to manage its demand and generation according to local climate
conditions, user needs, and energy network requirements. Energy Flexibility
of buildings will thus allow for DSM/load control and thereby DR based on
the requirements of the surrounding energy networks” [13]. From this
definition, it is clear that any approach to assess and harness building
energy flexibility needs to be able to capture both the energy demand
and generation potential (if it exists) of a building, as well as some form
of communication and/or coordination with the aggregator or elec­
tricity grid operator to ascertain the needs of the network. Note that per
the three distinct flexibility products that [5] describe in their review,
our definition of building energy flexibility is taken to cover both
ramping capacity (power) and energy products.
The energy flexibility from buildings may ultimately be used for
different purposes, including: power balance for frequency control by
the TSO, congestion management by either the TSO or DSO or portfolio
energy balancing by a Balancing Responsible Party (BRP). For further
details on these relevant stakeholders, the reader is referred to the re­
view of [5]. This demand side flexibility can be encouraged through
various mechanisms such as market prices, distribution tariffs, reli­
ability signals and incentive payments from aggregators who sell on the
3
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
aggregated flexibility on the markets. For example, in the day-ahead
market, electricity suppliers are required to nominate their electricity
bids to meet forecasted supply and demand, and on this basis, a
day-ahead price schedule is set. Real-Time Prices (RTP) and spot prices
are other examples of market pricing schemes and are dynamic and
better reflect the more granular variations (both temporal and loca­
tional) in the balancing requirements of the grid at the intra-day level.
Whilst these pricing signals may come from the wholesale market,
suppliers or aggregators often pass on such signals to end-use stake­
holders (customers), such as buildings, at the retail level. Regulation
signals require a building to track a certain power consumption profile
and this is a type of signal commonly used for ramping capacity (power).
Such ancillary services are often found at the wholesale market level. For
a more comprehensive summary of flexibility markets and products, the
reader is referred to the review by Ref. [5]. Furthermore, the reader is
referred to Ref. [39] for a summary and classification of DR pro­
grammes, in the context of residential sector applications.
2.2. Building modelling frameworks
Models of building components, systems and sub-systems are
required to predict the whole building and sub-system behaviour, such
as their energy consumption and evolution of internal temperature,
humidity and air quality [38]. The work of Maasoumy provides a review
of many of the different building simulation and modelling approaches
employed in smart building energy management [16]. This review was
focused on white-box and grey-box approaches while black-box ap­
proaches were not discussed. The summary below provides a brief
overview of white-box, grey-box and black-box (with the latter two
being data-driven per the definition of this review) approaches.
• White-box models: These are based on physical and first-principle
based modelling. Models can be high-fidelity, produced from simulation
software such as EnergyPlus, IESVE and TRNSYS to name a few
commercially available products, to reduced order models [38]. Models
can be based on static equations, or more commonly, dynamic equations
which represent the heat balance time evolution [41]. Generally, and for
detailed white-box simulation models in particular, complete physical
knowledge (including geometry, material properties, construction, etc.)
of the building is required to build such models, and this is often one of
the biggest drawbacks of such approaches [41]. Detailed white-box
simulation models, although often able to model the dynamics in a
comprehensive manner, are also generally considered not to be suitable
for on-line control of buildings due to their large computational over­
head bib38[24,38,42]. Nevertheless, there have been a few successful
implementations integrating such models with control bib43[15,
43–45], although these are considered to be out of scope for this review.
Models of systems such as thermal energy storage and electric batteries
are often simpler and well established and hence physics-based models
of these systems are commonly employed [46,47]. These models are not
considered within the scope of this review.
• Black-box models: Black-box approaches completely ignore the
physics and are fully empirical models [41]. These approaches require
extensive datasets including HVAC power consumption, indoor and
outdoor temperatures and setpoints to train the model. The training
datasets need to be large (covering all seasons) and rich (covering all
possible operational envelopes) [38,48]. This is often the most chal­
lenging aspect of developing data-driven models for building energy
management. Detailed simulation models, if they exist for the building,
can provide this training data but these often fail to capture the sto­
chastic nature of real data. Given large datasets with many features
(variables or sensors in this case), feature assessment and selection be­
comes a critical process to develop an accurate yet efficient model [49].
Elaborates on the importance of feature selection in data-driven models
for harnessing building energy flexibility. Models used to estimate DR
potential range from data-driven regression based models [50,51] and
decision trees [25] to completely black-box models such as Neural
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
Networks and Support Vector Machines [52].
• Grey-box models: These are a mix of physics-based and empirical
based models. Resistance-Capacitance (RC) (or Lumped-Capacitance)
models are one example of such models where the parameters are
identified using experimental data. Here a set of continuous time (sto­
chastic) differential equations are derived and system identification
techniques are used for parameter estimation [53]. Presents an approach
to develop and select a model suitable for predictive control focusing on
grey-box models only [54]. Further concluded that grey-box models are
ideal for buildings that are not overly complex and recommended sub­
space methods. Commonly used, a state-space (SS) model is a set of
input, output and state variables represented by first order differential
equations. Literature often provides the benefits of grey-box models as
allowing physical interpretation of the parameters of the model and an
understanding of some of the underlying physical phenomena behind
the building behaviour [33,55].
2.3. Building control frameworks
The control of the energy systems in a building is a unique and
complex problem given nonlinear dynamics of the building, time-
varying disturbances and constraints, interacting (and possibly con­
flicting) control loops within building systems and traditionally poor
availability of data from these systems [35]. For this reason, it is prudent
to review the control techniques used in the building energy manage­
ment domain with rigour and consideration to the above mentioned
challenges. Given a desire for buildings to be “grid-interactive”, the
controller is further required to be able to respond to external signals
representing the needs of the grid. In this vein, treating buildings as CPS
has received increased attention in recent years [29,56]. CPS are “in­
tegrations” of computation and physical processes. Embedded com­
puters and networks monitor and control the physical processes, usually
with feed-back loops where physical processes affect computations and
vice-versa [57]. The review by Ref. [29] of buildings as CPS focused on
the application of building energy efficiency and reducing operational
energy consumption [16]. Provides a comprehensive introduction to
building control design and the reader is pointed to this reference for
further details.
Note that the lines demarcating control techniques and models are
becoming blurred with techniques such as neural network (NN) control
where the black box model is trained on controller input-output
attempting to replace the controller. Control can further be classified
as model-based (either physics based or data-driven) or model-free (e.g.,
Reinforcement Learning). The main broad classes of control used to
categorise the studies reviewed are detailed further below.
2.3.1. Rule-Based Control (RBC)
Due to its simplicity, the standard practice in the building automa­
tion industry is RBC at the supervisory level, essentially a set of if-then-
else rules used to determine the best operating points for the system
[34]. These commonly include on/off controllers and PID controllers
(classical controllers) at the device level. Generally, the efficacy of these
rules depends on the expertise and knowledge of the building operator
[58]. RBC is able to exploit energy flexibility if the appropriate decision
criteria is used in the rules. There are a few such examples of RBC in the
literature incorporating predictive models [8,18,59,60]. However, these
approaches are increasingly being found to be inadequate with meeting
complex objectives, especially as the system complexity increases and
they require significant human oversight [58].
2.3.2. Model Predictive Control (MPC) & variants
MPC is based on the solution of an optimal control problem on an
iterative basis for a finite horizon (therefore also called receding horizon
control). For every time step, the optimal control sequence is found for a
finite time horizon whilst meeting constraints. The method is robust
against model errors and the effect of future exogenous disturbances.
4
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
This is because only the first step of the optimal control strategy is
implemented and at the next time step a new plant measurement is taken
and the process is repeated for the new horizon [16]. MPC is theoreti­
cally very suitable for optimal control of building. MPC provides a
framework for the optimisation of a cost function (e.g., cost, energy
consumption or CO2 emissions) subject to constraints over the predic­
tion horizon (e.g., thermal comfort constraints, HVAC system limits)
[24,58]. Furthermore, MPC is very suitable for utilising passive or active
thermal or electrical storage for shifting energy consumption as a form
of DSM. This is because of the ability of MPC to utilise a model to predict
the evolution of the state variable (e.g., zone temperature) under the
influence of the controlled inputs coupled with predictions of future
disturbances. These disturbances may be a signal representing the
flexibility required from the grid, or exogenous disturbances, such as
ambient temperature or other external weather conditions which in­
fluence the energy demands of a building.
Research into MPC applications in buildings in the academic com­
munity has surged in the last decade as Fig. 2 (b) in this article and the
review of [24] shows. A concise summary is presented below of the main
tenets of the MPC framework. The reader is referred to Refs. [24] for a
detailed description of terminology and taxonomy with respect to MPC
and an attempt at describing the MPC formulation framework with
respect to energy efficiency control of buildings and HVAC systems.
A control-oriented dynamical model of the system is required to
capture the behaviour of the system under controlled and uncontrolled
inputs. These models can either be physics-based (classical MPC) or
data-driven (sometimes called DPC or DDPC in the literature) as out­
lined in Section 2.2. As per Section 1.2, the greatest challenge for clas­
sical MPC approaches is deriving a suitable model of the building
thermal dynamics that is compatible with the optimal control problem
and yet captures the relevant dynamics of the building thermal behav­
iour [22,23]. The need for a compatible model is also faced by
data-driven MPC approaches, which exhibit a particular challenge to
ensure the convexity of the optimal control problem. A further challenge
is ensuring that the data-driven model is capable of capturing the dy­
namics and operating ranges of the building not seen in the training
data. Comparisons between the two approaches are rare for large
complex buildings, but notable studies include the work of [27,61]. In
both studies, the authors compared DPC with classical MPC for a bilinear
building model, where they found a comparable performance (cost
minimisation) of DPC to MPC, whilst bypassing the need for physical
modelling of the building. Where the system controlled is complex,
distributed MPC problems can be employed [46].
Further models are required to predict the evolution of uncontrolled
disturbance variables such as external weather conditions and energy
prices (hereby referred to as disturbance models). A further model is
necessary to test and validate an MPC framework at the design stage
[24] (hereby referred to as the surrogate simulation model). Often, this
is a high-fidelity simulation building model which closes the control
loop in simulation and provides the feedback to the controller.
In terms of the optimal control problem itself, the objective function
is a crucial element and dictates the overall global objectives of the MPC
framework. Generally, this will be dictated by the relevant stakeholder
preferences. An economic controller, unlike a controller purely mini­
mising energy consumption, aims to reduce the cost of energy con­
sumption and given time-varying prices can exploit the energy flexibility
of a building. Comfort related objective functions are common, mini­
mising discomfort to occupants and are often measured as deviations
from a target temperature setpoint. Multi-objective functions can take
multiple objectives into account with the respective weighting towards
the individual aspects dictated by the stakeholders or building man­
agers. As explained in Ref. [24], objective functions are generally either
quadratic (common in tracking problems), linear or min/max (e.g.,
reducing peak power).
There are variations to the classical MPC formulation. In most
practical examples, the controlled system may be influenced by
A. Kathirgamanathan et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120

uncertain disturbances, leading to deviations of the state variable (e.g., highly relevant for energy flexibility applications, as often a change in
building indoor zonal temperature) from the expected trajectory. Whilst objective function in these cases is sufficient for the approach to be used
deterministic MPC algorithms are unable to take this into account, and to shift energy consumption with regards to the needs of the grid. Hence,
hence vulnerable to degradations of control performance or violations of the insights from these studies regarding model and controller devel­
constraints, Stochastic Model Predictive Control (SMPC) introduces opment for slightly different applications are highly relevant.
chance constraints [62]. The introduced probabilistic distributions of Applying the above selection criteria, 115 studies were selected and
disturbances are often not exactly known, making the optimisation these were categorised based on the points of consideration summarised
problem computationally difficult to solve. Robust Model Predictive in Table 1. This table outlines the scope of the review and also provides
Control (RMPC) utilises a bounded set to describe the uncertainty with the relevant section for the analysis. Where appropriate, the reason why
the worst case scenario considered. This ultimately leads to a topic is considered to be beyond the scope of this review is given.
over-conservatism and is a weakness of RMPC [62]. The subject of model prediction accuracy is one such topic excluded
from this review. Other review papers have explicitly addressed this
2.3.3. Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning, where
an agent learns to take the optimal set of actions through interaction in a Table 1
Import aspects considered in the review and outline of scope.
dynamic environment (such as a building subject to changing weather
conditions, varying grid requirements and occupants with thermal Important Included in Details and Justification where not in Scope
Aspects Review?
comfort requirements), with the goal of maximising a certain reward
quantity [63]. For a comprehensive introduction to this field, the reader Application Section 4.2 Categorisation into: DSM, energy efficiency,
is referred to standard textbooks [64]. The major advantage of this Domain cost savings, thermal comfort, MPC and co-
simulation.
method is that it is potentially a model-free control approach avoiding
Building Section 4.3 Categorisation into: commercial, commercial
the need to create non-generalisable models of the building. Q-learning, group, institutional, multi zone, residential,
where the state-action value function is learned, is an established RL residential group, single-zone.
method and commonly found in literature [65]. In standard RL, the Model Section 4.4 Categorisation of the type of model used for
the building passive thermal mass: black box,
policy (based upon which the agent takes action) is updated online at
model-free, reduced order, regression based.
every time step, however, Batch Reinforcement Learning (BLR) is a Control Section 4.5 Categorisation of the type of control used for
variation where the policy is calculated offline using a batch of historical Methodology harnessing building energy flexibility: MPC,
data [65]. Another relatively recent variation is the use of deep neural MPC approx, hybrid MPC, RBC, RL.
networks in conjunction with RL with the neural network relating the Objective Section 4.6 Categorisation of the types of objective
Function functions used in optimal control problems:
value estimates and state-action pairs [66]. The reader is referred to the
cost, energy, comfort, other.
review conducted by Refs. [40] for a comprehensive review of the use of Flexibility Section 4.7 Categorisation of the different types of
RL in DR applications. Resources flexibility resources considered together with
building passive thermal mass: active
thermal, active electric, EV, on-site
3. Methods
generation.
Feature Selection Section 4.8 Whether feature selection was applied in the
This literature review summarises studies (with publication dates studies and what methods were used.
from 2010 to a cut-off date of 01/11/19) utilising data-driven predictive Grid Signals Section 4.9 Categorisation of what type of grid signals are
control (i.e., capable to react based on forecasted variables such as used by the predictive control frameworks:
DR, day-ahead, dynamic, other, regulation,
environmental, grid-signals or occupancy) for building energy man­ TOU.
agement and DSM. Only articles that consider the modelling of the Occupancy Section 4.9 Consideration whether occupancy was used as
building thermal dynamics (but including model-free studies such as RL an input for the predictive control. How
harnessing building passive thermal mass) are included. Hence, studies occupancy is forecast is beyond the scope of
this review. See Ref. [67,68] for further
that consider energy flexibility arising purely from active electric stor­
details on this.
age, active thermal storage or DERs such as solar PV, are disregarded. Weather Section 4.9 Consideration whether weather forecasts
For these systems, often simple and well understood physics-based were used as input for the predictive control.
equations are suitable as control-oriented models. Accordingly, they The climate type itself was not recorded as
do not necessarily present the same challenges with model identification this is not relevant to the modelling and
control focus of this review.
that building thermal dynamics presents. All models and control tech­ Control Test-bed Section 4.10 Categorisation of the types of test-bed used for
niques that use any form of sensor data from the building in question evaluating the controller: real and/or
(either real and measured or synthetic and simulated) are considered simulation.
data-driven approaches. The articles were screened, such that only those Controller Section 4.11 Investigation of the controller performance on
Performance a sample of the literature surveyed. This is
related to the following applications were selected:
difficult to compare in a meaningful manner
given different dynamic boundary conditions,
• DSM (incl. Harnessing energy flexibility, grid coordination, peak buildings and market conditions.
power reduction, increasing self-consumption); Predictive No This is difficult to compare in a meaningful
• Energy efficiency; Accuracy manner given different dynamic boundary
conditions, training data and buildings used
• Cost savings; in the literature. Therefore, this was
• Maintaining or improving thermal comfort; considered to be beyond the scope of this
• MPC development (incl. MPC alternatives); review. See Ref. [30,31,54] for further details
• Co-simulation development. on this.
Model No This is difficult to compare in a meaningful
Uncertainty manner given different dynamic boundary
In order not to limit the number of studies considered, the scope of conditions, training data and buildings used
the review was extended to those that utilised predictive control for in the literature. Model uncertainty is
applications such as improving thermal comfort/energy efficiency and considered to be beyond the scope for this
economic management, rather than limiting it to those for energy flex­ review. The reader is referred to the reviews
of [69,70] for discussion on this topic.
ibility applications only. The rationale is that such studies can also be

5
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
issue [30,33,54] and these reviews have found that a variety of different
metrics have been used to report model accuracy. Further, given
different test periods, climates and buildings, a direct comparison of
these quantitative values is generally not necessarily meaningful. Simi­
larly, the topic of model uncertainty is also considered to be beyond the
scope for this review. The reader is referred to the reviews of [69,70] for
discussion on this topic. A full list of the reviewed papers and catego­
risation on the above points is presented in Table 2. Section 4 is
organised with reference to Table 2, where each section subheading is
taken from Table 2. From these results, a discussion is presented and
research gaps and potential future research directions were identified.
4. Data-driven predictive control approaches
4.1. Review summary
Table 2 provides a summary of the reviewed articles meeting the
scope described above and categorises the works in terms of the key
factors outlined in Section 3 (Methods). The remaining part of this
section critically reviews and comments about the individual studies
themselves as well as broader trends discovered from this survey.
4.2. Application of studies
Fig. 1(a) shows the categorisation of the studies based on the
application of the work. The review shows that data-driven predictive
control techniques have been implemented for DSM applications in a
significant number of studies, justifying the need for this review. Such
techniques have also been used commonly in the related applications of
energy efficiency and cost savings. Significant research has also gone
into alternatives of traditional model-based MPC for predictive control
given some of the challenges of model and control development.
4.3. Building type
As Fig. 1(b) shows, commercial buildings have received significantly
more attention than residential buildings in the domain of predictive
control. Commercial buildings are, generally, more complex in terms of
the geometry, size and energy systems present, compared to residential
buildings. However, it is generally easier to obtain training data from
commercial buildings given the presence of BEMS, the benefits of pre­
dictive control are more notable and the impact of occupancy is less
pronounced compared to residential buildings. Single zone buildings
have received a lot of attention (note that many of the studies cat­
egorised as residential are in-fact only single zones) as opposed to multi-
zone buildings, which present further complexities and challenges in the
modelling, e.g., capturing the thermal interactions between zones [36].
Further, many studies have approximated a multi-zone building as a
single zone (e.g., through averaging zonal temperatures) [82,154]. Very
significantly, a small proportion of the studies were implemented on
more than one building. There are some studies that have considered
multiple buildings at the aggregator level but in the case of [158], they
did not provide details on the modelling of the building dynamics.
4.4. Building thermal dynamics model
Fig. 2(b) shows the publications categorised by the type of model
used to simulate the thermal dynamics of the building passive thermal
mass in studies where MPC is implemented (the majority in the review
as shown by Fig. 2(a)). By far and large, the majority of studies have
employed reduced order models with state-space implementation the
most common type of model within this category. One explanation for
this is that the theory around state-space models is well established and
they are commonly used in MPC applications in many industries, and in
particular the process industry.
Black-box approaches aimed at capturing the building thermal
6
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
dynamics are seen to be increasing in number over the last few years.
These include: tree based methods, NN, guassian processes and deep
learning approaches (in decreasing order of occurrence). Generally
highly nonlinear and implicitly relating the system inputs to the outputs,
various approaches have been employed in literature to integrate these
models as part of an optimal control framework. Some of the approaches
reviewed found ways to keep the optimisation problem linear, e.g.,
through the separation of variables technique [25,74,92,93], whereas
others used optimisers that are able to deal with the non-linearity, e.g.,
Genetic Algorithms (GA) [26,123] and Branch and Bound [126], which
use the data-driven models to create a discrete search space with heu­
ristic optimisation to find the optimal solution.
One of the findings that can be made from this review is that most
studies do not quantify the predictive power of the models over the
length of prediction horizon (as [54] did). This is not such an issue for
receding horizon approaches (such as MPC), however, the impact on
performance of predictive control is not well known. For certain
black-box models (e.g., NN and tree-based models), model pruning is
also an essential step to ensure that the model does not overfit (i.e.,
generalises poorly on unseen data).
4.5. Control approaches
Fig. 2(a) shows the number of publications per year categorised by
the type of control used. The first major trend that is visible is the
increasing interest and publication of research in the area of the data-
driven predictive control of building energy systems. Whilst MPC ap­
proaches dominate the studies, the use of black-box model based MPC
shows an upwards trend in more recent years (Fig. 2(b)). RL as a model-
free control technique has seen increased interest in the last few years
and this is also seen in the more comprehensive review of the technique
by Refs. [40]. The other control techniques used in the reviewed papers
had small sample sizes.
One domain that has attracted increased attention is data-driven
approaches that learn and approximate based on MPC input-output
training data [26,85,86,89,98]. [85,86] used Deep Time Delay Neural
Network (TDNN) to train on MPC data based on a physics-based model
and was able to reduce the computational and memory requirements
significantly using this model instead. The authors argue that such an
approach has the benefits of a low computational footprint, minimal
software dependencies and easy deployment on low level hardware.
Whilst this approach has benefits from an operational standpoint, the
need for development of the original MPC model and controller that
provide the training data provides challenges for implementation.
4.6. Optimisation objectives
The optimisation objective function ultimately determines the global
objectives desired from the controlled process and are usually deter­
mined by the stakeholders, in this case, typically the building owner or
energy manager. The preferences of the occupants of conditioned spaces
may also influence the objectives of the optimisation. These objectives
are usually related to thermal comfort (e.g., maintaining internal zone
temperature within bounds and minimising occupant discomfort hours),
economic goals (e.g., minimising overall energy demand or operational
costs), or environmental goals (e.g., maximising RES self-consumption
or reducing CO2 intensity of energy consumed). Fig. 3(a) plots the
number of publications categorised by the objective function consid­
ered. Minimisation of energy demand is the most commonly considered
objective function in the studies reviewed, followed by minimisation of
cost (economic) and minimisation of discomfort. Note that time-varying
price signals are required for a cost objective function to be relevant.
Given this, however, a day-ahead price schedule or forecast for RTP is all
that is required to change an energy minimisation problem into a cost
minimisation problem. An economic objective function would also allow
the capture of revenue from DR programmes to be quantified in the case
A. Kathirgamanathan et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120

Table 2
Application, building model, control technique and energy flexibility scope of reviewed data-driven predictive control studies.
Ref Application Building Testbed Control Comfort Building Building Model Feature Weather Grid Signal Occupancy
Type Type Metric Model Details Selection Forecast Forecast

[20] Energy Residential Simulation MPC Black Box NN No Yes TOU No

Efficiency
[71] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS No Yes None Yes
Order
[72] DSM Residential Simulation MPC Temp Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU No
Order
[56] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Temp Black Box Tree based No Yes DR Yes
[25] Energy Commercial Simulation MPC Temp Black Box Tree based No Yes DR Yes
Efficiency
[73] Cost Savings Commercial Simulation MPC Regression Linear No Yes DR Yes
Based Regression
[14] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU No
Order
[74] Energy Residential Real MPC Temp Black Box Tree based No Yes None Yes
Efficiency
[75] Energy Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS No Yes None No
Efficiency Order
[76] Energy Commercial Simulation MPC PMV2 Reduced SS No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
[77] Energy Commercial Simulation MPC Temp2 Reduced SS No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
[78] DSM Residential Simulation MPC Reduced SS No Yes None Yes
Order
[65] Cost Savings Single Zone Real + RL Black Box NN No Yes Dynamic No
Simulation
[79] Energy Commercial Real MPC Black Box Gaussian Process No Yes None No
Efficiency
[80] DSM Residential Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Order
[81] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU No
Order
[82] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU No
Order
[83] Cost Savings Commercial Real MPC Temp2 Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU Yes
Order
[84] Energy Commercial Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
2
[85] MPC Commercial Simulation Approx Temp Black Box NN Yes Yes None No
Alternatives MPC
[86] MPC Commercial Real + Approx Temp2 Black Box NN No Yes None Yes
Alternatives Simulation MPC
[26] Energy Institutional Real Approx PMV Black Box NN No Yes None No
Efficiency MPC
[87] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Day-ahead Yes
Order
[88] Energy Commercial Simulation MPC Black Box NN No Yes None Yes
Efficiency
[18] Cost Savings Commercial Real + RBC No Yes TOU No
Simulation
[11] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS No No Regulation No
Order
[89] Energy Commercial Real Approx Black Box Tree based No Yes None No
Efficiency MPC
[90] Cost Savings Residential Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Dynamic Yes
Order
[91] Cost Savings Commercial Real + Hybrid Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU Yes
Simulation MPC Order
[92] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Black Box Gaussian Process No Yes Regulation Yes
Alternatives
[93] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Temp2 Black Box Tree based No Yes None Yes
Alternatives
[94] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Black Box Gaussian Process No Yes Regulation Yes
[27] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Temp Black Box Tree based No Yes Regulation Yes
Alternatives
[95] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Temp2 Black Box Tree based No Yes None Yes
[96] Cost Savings Commercial Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU Yes
Order
[97] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Order
[98] MPC Single Zone Simulation Approx Black Box Deep Learning No Yes None No
Alternatives MPC
[99] Cost Savings Commercial Real MPC Black Box TS-Fuzzy No Yes None Yes
[8] DSM Commercial Simulation RBC SS (RC) No Yes Yes
(continued on next page)

7
A. Kathirgamanathan et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120

Table 2 (continued )
Ref Application Building Testbed Control Comfort Building Building Model Feature Weather Grid Signal Occupancy
Type Type Metric Model Details Selection Forecast Forecast

Reduced Grid
Order Support
Coefficient
[100] DSM Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS No Yes Dynamic + No
Order CO2
intensity
[45] MPC Commercial Simulation RL Black Box Gaussian Process No Yes None Yes
Alternatives
[101] Co- Commercial Simulation MPC Temp2 Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
simulation Order
[102] Energy Commercial Real MPC Temp Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
[42] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Development Order
[103] Cost Savings Commercial Simulation MPC Temp2 Black Box Tree based Yes Yes TOU + Day- Yes
ahead
[104] DSM Residential Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Dynamic Yes
Order
2
[105] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Temp Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Development Order
[106] DSM Commercial Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes DR No
Order
[107] Energy Multi Zone Simulation MPC Temp2 Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Efficiency Order
[59] Energy Commercial Real RBC Black Box NN No Yes None Yes
Efficiency
[108] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Regulation Yes
Group Order
[60] Thermal Commercial RBC Temp Regression Linear No Yes Day-ahead No
Comfort Based Programme
[109] MPC Commercial Real Fuzzy Black Box NN No Yes None No
Alternatives Logic
[110] DSM Residential Simulation MPC Temp Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU + Day- Yes
Order ahead
[111] Cost Savings Residential Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Day-ahead Yes
Order + Dynamic
+ TOU
[46] DSM Residential Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Dynamic Yes
Group Order
[112] DSM Residential Simulation RL Model-free Model-free No No TOU No
Group
[19] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Black Box Gaussian Process Yes Yes Regulation Yes
Alternatives
[113] Cost Savings Residential Simulation MPC Temp2 Reduced SS No Yes TOU Yes
Order
[114] DSM Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Dynamic Yes
Order
[115] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Alternatives Order
[116] DSM Commercial Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU Yes
Order
[117] DSM Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU + Yes
Order Dynamic
[118] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes DR Yes
Order
[119] DSM Residential Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Dynamic Yes
Order
[120] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Temp2 Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Alternatives Order
[121] Energy Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
[122] Exergy Institutional Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Control Order
[123] Cost Savings Commercial Simulation MPC Black Box NN No Yes TOU Yes
[124] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS No Yes DR Yes
Alternatives Order
[125] Cost Savings Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS No Yes TOU Yes
Order
[126] Cost Savings Institutional Real MPC Black Box NN No No TOU Yes
[127] Energy Residential Simulation RL Binary Model-free Model-free Yes No None No
Efficiency
[128] Energy Residential Simulation MPC Temp2 + Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Efficiency Humidity2 Order
[129] Energy Single Zone Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Efficiency Order
(continued on next page)

8
A. Kathirgamanathan et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120

Table 2 (continued )
Ref Application Building Testbed Control Comfort Building Building Model Feature Weather Grid Signal Occupancy
Type Type Metric Model Details Selection Forecast Forecast

[62] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Alternatives Order
[130] Energy Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
[131] Energy Institutional Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Efficiency Order
[61] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Temp2 Black Box Tree based No Yes None Yes
Alternatives
[132] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Temp2 Black Box Tree based No Yes None Yes
Alternatives
[132] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Black Box Tree based No Yes Regulation Yes
[132] Energy Residential Real MPC Temp Black Box Tree based No Yes None Yes
Efficiency
[133] Energy Commercial Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
[22] MPC Commercial Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU Yes
Development Order
[134] Cost Savings Residential Simulation MPC Temp Regression ARX No Yes TOU Yes
Based
[135] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Regulation Yes
Order
[136] Thermal Single Zone Real MPC Temp2 Reduced SS No Yes None Yes
Comfort Order
[137] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS No Yes TOU No
Development Order
[138] MPC Single Zone Real MPC Reduced SS No Yes None Yes
Development Order
[139] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Temp2 Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Development Order
[140] DSM Residential Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Group Order
[141] MPC Residential Simulation RL Model-free Model-free No No None No
Alternatives
2
[142] Energy Residential Real MPC Temp Reduced SS No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
[143] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Regulation Yes
Group Order
[144] DSM Single Zone Real + MPC Temp2 Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU + Day- Yes
Simulation Order ahead +
Dynamic
[145] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Regulation Yes
Group Order
[146] DSM Commercial Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Order
[47] DSM Single Zone Simulation MPC Temp2 Reduced SS (RC) No Yes TOU + Day- Yes
Order ahead +
Dynamic
[33] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Temp2 Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None No
Alternatives Order
[33] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Temp2 Black Box Multiple No Yes None No
Alternatives
[31] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Alternatives Order
[31] MPC Single Zone Simulation RL Model-free Model-free No Yes None No
Alternatives
[66] MPC Multi Zone Simulation RL Model-free Model-free No Yes TOU No
Alternatives
[147] Energy Single Zone Simulation MPC Temp Black Box ARX No Yes PEF Yes
Efficiency
[148] MPC Single Zone Simulation MPC Black Box NN Yes No None Yes
Alternatives
[149] Energy Commercial Real MPC Black Box NN Yes Yes None No
Efficiency
[150] Energy Institutional Simulation MPC Temp Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Efficiency Order
[151] DSM Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Regulation Yes
Order
[152] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Alternatives Order
[153] Energy Commercial Real RL Temp2 Model-free Model-free No No None No
Efficiency
[154] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Regression semiparametric No Yes None Yes
Alternatives Based regression
[154] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Alternatives Order
(continued on next page)

9
A. Kathirgamanathan et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120

Table 2 (continued )
Ref Application Building Testbed Control Comfort Building Building Model Feature Weather Grid Signal Occupancy
Type Type Metric Model Details Selection Forecast Forecast

[155] MPC Residential Simulation MPC Black Box Multiple No No Dynamic No

Alternatives
[156] MPC Commercial Simulation MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes None Yes
Development Order
[157] MPC Residential Real MPC Reduced SS (RC) No Yes Day-ahead No
Development Order

Fig. 1. (a) Number of publications by application type, (b) number of publications with building type and testbed type.

Fig. 2. (a) Number of publications by year and control type, (b) number of MPC publications by year and building model type.

of incentive based DR. The effectiveness of the pricing signal is crucial in control objective may incentivise the use of greater overall energy
enabling and promoting the energy flexibility of a building to be utilised. consumption, and second, the pricing signal may not correlate well with
Note that the use of an economic cost objective function may not the CO2 emissions from generation.
necessarily lead to the best environmental outcome as, firstly, such a Comfort considerations are taken into account in the reviewed

10
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
Fig. 3. (a) Number of Publications by Optimisation Objectives Considered, (b) Number of Publications by Energy Flexibility Resources Considered (excluding
building passive thermal mass).
literature predominantly through quantifying the deviation of internal
temperatures (either state or output variable) from either a setpoint or
allowable band of temperatures. These are very often time-varying and
can either be found in the objective function or in the constraints (either
as hard or soft versions with a weighted slack variable in the objective
function). Very few studies considered other thermal comfort parame­
ters such as Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), which directly describes user
thermal comfort and hence are not as conservative as temperature
control [76]. However, this does pose additional challenges such as
resulting in a nonlinear optimisation problem increasing computational
complexity and requiring further knowledge of occupants such as ac­
tivity and clothing levels.
Investigating the form of the objective function, it can be seen that
for the comfort objectives, quadratic cost functions are the most com­
mon. This is representative of tracking problems (e.g., tracking the
temperature setpoint) where the quadratic form helps with stability and
reduced computational effort of the optimisation [24]. Otherwise, linear
functions are used, and where the problem is multi-objective (e.g.,
minimising discomfort and minimising operational cost), appropriate
weighting terms must be given to the different objectives based on the
stakeholder requirements and priorities.
Other objectives found in the reviewed literature include stability of
the controller [72], minimising PV curtailment [78], minimising peak
loads [92,97], minimising CO2 emissions [100], minimising exergy
destruction [122], minimising the primary energy factor [147] and
provision of reserve bib146[143,146] although these are very much in
the minority. However, this also shows the flexibility of the MPC
approach to differing stakeholder requirements hence its increased in­
terest in the building energy management area. The stability require­
ment of the controller for building energy management is generally
relaxed due to the slower dynamics found in buildings compared to
other systems and hence control objectives are dictated by performance
objectives primarily [115].
4.7. Energy flexibility resources considered
A key objective of this review is to investigate the energy flexibility
resources considered in the studies utilising predictive control. All
studies reviewed with an application of DSM here utilised building
11
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
passive thermal mass. Building passive thermal mass receives the most
attention due to the significant potential it has for energy flexibility
applications, but also for the challenges mentioned previously regarding
suitably modelling the thermal-dynamics of buildings for control ap­
plications. When considering other energy flexibility sources, as Fig. 3
(b) shows, considerably fewer studies considered active thermal energy
storage systems and active electrical energy storage systems, such as
batteries. Even fewer studies considered EVs and on-site generation as
flexibility resources within the predictive control framework. Only one
study considered all of the flexibility resources mentioned above [46].
The study by Mirakhorli and Dong considered 15,000 residential
buildings integrating the grid and nodal pricing to coordinate the
operation of the buildings.
4.8. Feature selection
Considering the studies in the review, only six employed a formalised
feature selection technique (i.e., a process in the model development
pipeline for reducing the dimension of the input space to the data-driven
model) as part of their methodology [85]. Employed a three step process
in selecting the features for use in the Deep TDNN model to approximate
MPC laws. The steps involved are a manual engineering judgement
based on elimination of linearly dependent features (i.e., those input
features that are highly correlated and hence they do not add significant
information to the machine learning model), a principal component
analysis based dimensionality reduction and, finally, selection of the
disturbance features based on the model disturbance dynamics [103].
used an if-then rules based optimal feature selection framework,
although this was limited to the selection of lag terms based upon the
day of the week [19]. were required to use the Automatic Relevance
Determination tool of Gaussian Processes (GPs) for selecting the relevant
inputs for the GPs modeling the response of the buildings to a control
signal [127]. Employed an ANN based auto-encoder for dimensionality
reduction in the application of a model-free RL strategy for reducing the
energy consumption of a heat pump [148]. and [149] used the boosting
tree algorithm for dimensionality reduction for neural network models.
This review highlights that most studies do not consider the issue of
feature assessment to be important, as [29] also concluded in their re­
view study, and that when employed, there is a lack of a standard
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
methodology or process in these studies.
4.9. Forecasts used
The studies were categorised based on the predictive inputs used for
the predictive controller. Almost all the studies considered included
future predictions of external weather variables as inputs (93% of
studies considered). Investigating the studies that did not consider
future weather inputs [159], developed a predictive control strategy for
active thermal storage only, which if sufficiently well insulated, is
somewhat damped from the effects of ambient conditions [11]. assumed
constant ambient conditions as part of the linearisation process for the
building thermal dynamics [141]. and [153] utilised RL control ap­
proaches which learn from the state-reward relationship over time and
hence can be implemented without the requirement for predictive
weather forecasts. However, whether there are potential performance
improvements when weather forecasts are used as part of the state in the
RL problem is not known and should be investigated [155]. trained
data-driven models based on past data from an MPC controller with
purely past inputs (ambient temperature and electricity price). In most
cases, offline predictions are used (which rely on data which has already
been measured) with exact forecasts of disturbances used in testing the
controller. This is frequently done to simplify the implementation of the
controller and performance bounds are obtained in such cases (i.e., in
reality, there will always be errors in the forecasting of weather and
occupancy degrading the performance of the controller with respect to
its objectives). Studies have looked at the effect of uncertainties in
weather predictions [73] and pricing [160]. SMPC [62,115,151] and
RMPC [152] are variations to traditional MPC that are better able to deal
with uncertainties in the forecast.
The ability to receive and react to forecast energy grid signals is
crucial for any DSM measure. The grid signals considered by the studies
is illustrated in Fig. 4. Approximately 48% of studies considered grid
signals as part of the control framework. The most common pricing
signal used was TOU (static) prices, which are currently very common in
electricity markets and, as rates and times are fixed in advance, do not
require a forecast model. Dynamic pricing signals, such as RTP and spot
market prices, apply variations in pricing at a more granular level (both
Fig. 4. Number of publications by type of grid signal considered.
12
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
temporal and locational). These are the next most common and are
usually easily accounted for in MPC schemes, although these require
forecasting for the prediction horizon (unless exact knowledge is
assumed like the majority of studies). Various techniques, such as Sup­
port Vector Regression [114] have been used when forecasts of grid
signals are required. For a full review of the state-of-the-art in short-term
electricity price forecasting, the reader is referred to Ref. [161]. Regu­
lation signals are a power consumption profile for the building to follow
and in this case, the objective function will be the tracking error of the
building power consumption. Other grid signals considered in the
reviewed papers are the grid support coefficient [8] (measuring the
impact of additional load based on the electricity demand on the grid at
a time instance) and CO2 intensity [100]. Generally, these signals and
forecasts are provided directly from the grid-side and can be considered
to be a third-party input to the predictive control framework of an in­
dividual building.
Forecasting and use of occupancy as a disturbance was also consid­
ered in the majority of studies (66%). Given that building energy sys­
tems have the primary role of satisfying occupant needs, the ability to
detect whether a building or zone is occupied is fundamental to building
energy management and control. Many studies assumed a constant
schedule (primarily for commercial buildings where the occupancy
patterns are more predictable due to given working hours). For more
details on the state-of-the-art in short term predictions of occupancy in
commercial buildings, the reader is referred to Ref. [67]. For residential
buildings, the occupancy trends are more stochastic and random and the
assumption of a constant schedule is less justifiable [162]. [68] Provides
a comparative review of forecasting approaches for household occu­
pancy using past records of the occupancy state. See Ref. [24] for a re­
view of prediction models of disturbances in MPC studies for energy
efficiency applications.
4.10. Validation of approaches
As Fig. 1(b) illustrates, most controllers are tested only on virtual
(surrogate simulation) testbeds such as through the use of a co-
simulation environment. In these cases, the surrogate simulation is
generally a physics-based white-box model although the control-
oriented building model can also be used to test the performance of
the controller [24]. Few studies have implemented predictive control­
lers on real buildings and there are numerous reasons for this. One of the
reasons that this may be the case is that building owners and managers
are not willing to take a risk on compromising occupant comfort through
modifications or replacement to the building control system for testing
purposes. This is especially true when significant hardware changes are
required as part of implementing and testing the controller and the
reliability of such controllers has not been proven. Further, in experi­
mental applications, the predictive controller needs to be integrated
with the BAS system of the building which can be a time-consuming and
costly process. However, testing the controller on a real building pre­
sents the challenge of quantifying the savings achieved through pre­
dictive control as it is not usually possible to also test the reference
control for the exact same conditions.
4.11. Quantitative performance of techniques
A summary of the data-driven predictive controller performance
taken from 10 relevant papers is presented in a quantitative manner in
Table 3. Data-driven predictive control has generally been shown to
outperform baseline RBC systems, for the various controller objectives
encountered. From the sampled studies, where the controller perfor­
mance is quantified, an average saving of 23% is seen for either cost or
energy consumption compared to the RBC baselines. This is often due to
the capabilities of data-driven predictive control to take into account the
forecasts of exogenous inputs such as weather and price signals. How­
ever, it is not a trivial exercise to compare the performance of such
A. Kathirgamanathan et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120

Table 3
Comparison of quantitative performance of a sample of studies implementing data-driven predictive control.
Ref Author Year Model Type Control Type Testbed Controller Performance Baseline

[20] Afram, A 2017 Black-box - NN MPC Simulation 6–73% saving cost RBC
[74] Bunning, F 2019 Black Box - Tree Based MPC Real 25% saving cooling energy RBC
[65] Costanzo, G 2016 Black-box - NN RL Real + Simulation 90% within mathematical optimum MPC
[83] De Coninck, R 2016 Reduced Order - SS (RC) MPC Real 30% saving cost RBC
[18] Gwerder, M 2013 Model-free RBC (Predictive) Real + Simulation 15% saving cost RBC
[89] Hilliard, T 2017 Black Box - Tree Based Approx MPC Real 29% saving energy RBC
[91] Huang, H 2015 Reduced Order - SS (RC) Hybrid MPC Real + Simulation 13% saving cost RBC
[109] Marvuglia, A 2014 Black-box - NN Fuzzy Logic Real Not given N/A
[125] Robillart, M 2019 Reduced Order - SS MPC Simulation 6–13% saving cost RBC
[134] Tabares-Velasco, P 2019 Regression Based - ARX MPC Simulation 30% saving cost RBC

controllers from different studies in any meaningful manner, given the
different building types, exogenous disturbances (such as weather and
grid signals) and time periods considered. Therefore, the efficacy of the
different techniques cannot readily be assessed and compared.
5. Discussion
With data-driven models being increasingly used for building control
applications in the domain of DSM, in addition to more traditional do­
mains such as energy efficiency and economic management, there is a
need to understand the data features that are most relevant to this
application. Further, given the “Internet of Things” revolution and
consequent rapid explosion of use of sensors in buildings and resulting
availability of building data, feature assessment and selection is an
increasingly important part of the data-driven model development
“pipeline”. Only 5% of the studies considered feature selection in model
development which questions how suitable and robust the methods used
in the reviewed studies would be for large complex buildings with many
sensors and data features available. For example [85], were able to use a
simple feature selection approach to reduce the complexity of the
controller and reduce the implementation cost of the predictive
controller. Further benefits of feature selection are increasing the pre­
dictive accuracy of the data-driven models and this allows greater
amounts of energy flexibility to be harnessed with lower probability of
comfort and other constraints being breached. Feature selection also
allows a better understanding of the underlying phenomena and pro­
cesses involved in the models.
As Fig. 2(b) showed, there have been an increasing number of studies
that have integrated a control-oriented black-box model for the process
dynamics with a MPC controller (DDPC or DPC). Given that black-box
models are often highly non-linear, this poses challenges for inte­
grating with the optimisation framework present in MPC. Some of the
approaches reviewed found ways to keep the optimisation problem
linear whereas others used optimisers that are able to deal with the non-
linearity, albeit at a computational cost. Depending on the length of the
control timestep, this may or may not be an issue. Each approach has its
own peculiarities and benefits, e.g., the “separation of variables” tech­
nique ensures a convex optimisation problem with a guaranteed solu­
tion; the Branch and Bound technique provides the advantages of a
guaranteed optimal solution and poses no constraints on the formulation
of the objective function although it is a heuristic optimisation method.
As explained further in the next section, it is challenging to make
meaningful comparisons of these different techniques given the
reviewed studies and no benchmarking.
A high level of simplification can be observed in the studies
reviewed, highlighting the challenges faced in reality when modelling
the building stock. Many studies approximated multi-zone buildings as a
single-zone for the building thermal dynamic model. Given that zones
may have very different thermal behaviours (given differing occupancy
patterns and energy gains), especially in commercial building cases, the
implications of such simplifications are not always fully understood or
quantified. There have also been very few studies that have considered
clusters or groups of buildings in the implementation of predictive
control. This is further compounded by the fact that most studies
perform validation of the model and control on surrogate simulations, as
outlined in Section 4.3 (see Fig. 1(b)). Fewer studies test the controller in
a real building. This raises the question whether the findings of one case
study for a given building are replicable given another building, as well
as questioning the scalability and generalisability of the studies and
methods in the literature. These findings are also identical in the prob­
lem domain of building energy consumption prediction, with the ma­
jority of studies testing a machine learning modeling framework on data
from a single building [163]. Often, the studies offer an improvement
that would be dwarfed by the level of variance that would be seen when
employing the algorithm on many real-world datasets. As [163] points
out, there is a lack of benchmarking over many buildings (both the
datasets and processes) for prediction based on meter data and the same
applies to the domain of predictive control. This lack of benchmarking is
also reflected when attempting to compare the efficiency and value of
the existing strategies reviewed as part of this study (see Table 3). There
is little consistency nor standard benchmarks available for the training
data, assumed boundary conditions, grid signals, market parameters or
buildings investigated. Whilst such environments do exist in certain
specific domains, e.g., the implementation of RL agents for the district
level building DSM problem (CityLearn [164]), more general purpose
environments that also allow and cater for other data-driven approaches
are lacking.
Less than 1% of studies considered five energy flexibility resources in
the predictive control framework (building passive thermal mass, active
thermal storage, active electric storage, EV and on-site generation). Over
75% of studies considered only one resource (predominantly building
passive thermal mass). Although likely representative of the current
building stock in general, when only buildings with high DSM potential
(either large consumption or availability of energy flexibility resources)
are considered, a predictive control framework able to account for
multiple-energy vectors is required. This is a pressing need given the rise
in electric storage [165], EVs [166] and on-site generation [167,168] in
both commercial and residential buildings anticipated.
6. Conclusions
In the vast majority of buildings, the control loop between the grid
and the building has not been closed, which has left these buildings
unable to become significant participants in DR programmes and to
contribute to the balancing needs of the future smart grid. Data-driven
predictive control has the potential to be a framework to allow this
closing of the loop, where deriving physics based control suitable models
of the building is difficult or incapable of being scaled. This article
reviewed 115 current implementations of data-driven predictive control
in building energy management and provides the following key insights:
• Data-driven predictive control has been shown in the literature to be
a very promising technique for enabling grid-interactive buildings
that can harness the passive thermal mass embedded within the

13
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
building. The literature shows meaningful integration with the grid
and carbon footprint reduction at the single building level. Model
Predictive Control and variants (e.g., Robust Model Predictive Con­
trol, Stochastic Model Predictive Control) dominates as one of the
control strategies with the most research interest with Reinforcement
Learning garnering increased interest, particularly in recent years.
• Given the increased installation of sensors in buildings and avail­
ability of data features, there is little justification for the features
selected and used in studies to train the building models. Moreover,
no standard methodology is utilised in the model and controller
development pipeline for the application of feature selection and
engineering.
• For optimal control strategies, the building model needs to be
compatible with the optimisation formulation with linear or
quadratic models guaranteeing convexity. Many varied approaches
for integrating black-box models with traditional Model Predictive
Control with differing benefits and costs have been utilised in the
literature. There have been few comparisons made in this relatively
novel domain and there is a need for both benchmarking datasets, as
well as processes and toolkits to facilitate benchmarking. Without
these benchmarking tools, it is very difficult to compare the efficacy
and scalability of the different data-driven techniques implemented
to date, due to the varying buildings and dynamic boundary condi­
tions used in individual studies.
• Most predictive control applications that utilise building passive
thermal mass are only implemented on single buildings. The exten­
sion of such methodologies to the wider building stock remains an
open question. Therefore, for the widespread adoption of predictive
control for Demand Side Management, the scalability of the ap­
proaches needs to be proven.
• Most predictive control frameworks are only validated and tested on
surrogate simulations. The ease of implementation and integration
with Building Automation Systems as well as the ability of the
controller and model to react to real stochastic disturbances is not
commonly considered in the studies.
• Few studies that utilise building passive thermal mass have also
considered other sources of building energy flexibility (e.g., thermal
energy storage, batteries, electric vehicles) and onsite generation,
which are increasingly being integrated with building energy
systems.
7. Recommendations and future work
Data-driven predictive control has been shown to be a promising
candidate for building integration with the electrical grid and unlocking
building energy flexibility. However, the results of this review indicate
some research areas that require further attention to accelerate the
market accessibility and penetration of these techniques. These research
gaps include: feature selection, need for benchmarking, influence of data
quality and scalability in the model and control development process. To
address these areas of concern, the following research questions are
posed as future challenges:
• What is a suitable and robust methodology for selecting the data
features most relevant for building energy flexibility applications?
What are these data features that are essential for a given type of
building?
• What data-driven technique is most suitable for predictive optimal
control for building energy management and harnessing energy
flexibility in multi-energy vector buildings? What is a suitable
benchmarking dataset and process for comparing these different
techniques?
• What is the influence of data quality (synthetic/real, training pe­
riods, etc.) on the performance of the predictive control and model
and its consequent impact on harnessed energy flexibility?
14
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
• How can the data-driven model and control development process for
one building be modified to allow a more transferrable and scalable
approach to other or multiple buildings?
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge that their contribution
emanated from research supported by Science Foundation Ireland under
the SFI Strategic Partnership Programme Grant Number SFI/15/SPP/
E3125.
References
[1] Lund PD, Lindgren J, Mikkola J, Salpakari J. Review of energy system flexibility
measures to enable high levels of variable renewable electricity. Renew Sustain
Energy Rev 2015;45:785–807.
[2] Greenblatt JB, Brown NR, Slaybaugh R, Wilks T, Stewart E, Mccoy ST. The future
of low-carbon electricity. Annual Reviews 2017;42:289–316.
[3] Holttinen H, Meibom P, Orths A, Rohrig K, O’Malley M, Ummels B, Tande JO,
Estanqueiro A, Gomez E, Söder L, Smith JC. Impacts of large amounts of wind
power on design and operation of power systems, results of IEA collaboration.
Wind Energy 2009;14:179–92.
[4] Haegel NM, Margolis R, Buonassisi T, Feldman D, Froitzheim A, Garabedian R,
Green M, Glunz S, Henning HM, Holder B, Kaizuka I, Kroposki B, Matsubara K,
Niki S, Sakurai K, Schindler RA, Tumas W, Weber ER, Wilson G, Woodhouse M,
Kurtz S. Terawatt-scale photovoltaics: trajectories and challenges. Science 2017;
356:141–3.
[5] Villar J, Bessa R, Matos M. Flexibility products and markets: literature review.
Elec Power Syst Res 2018;154:329–40.
[6] Cochran J, Miller M, Zinaman O, Milligan M, Arent D, Palmintier B, Malley MO,
Mueller S, Lannoye E, Epri AT, Kujala B, Power N, Sommer M, Holttinen H,
Kiviluoma J, Soonee S. Flexibility in 21st century power systems. Technical
Report; 2014.
[7] Hull L. DSM/DSR: what, why and how? EA Technology: Technical Report
November; 2012.
[8] Klein K, Herkel S, Henning H-M, Felsmann C. Load shifting using the heating and
cooling system of an office building: quantitative potential evaluation for
different flexibility and storage options. Appl Energy 2017;203:917–37.
[9] Economidou M, Laustsen J, Ruyssevelt P, Staniaszek D. Europe’s buildings under
the microscope, technical report. Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE);
2011.
[10] Reynders G, Nuytten T, Saelens D. Potential of structural thermal mass for
demand-side management in dwellings. Build Environ 2013;64:187–99.
[11] Hao H, Middelkoop T, Barooah P, Meyn S. How demand response from
commercial buildings will provide the regulation needs of the grid, 2012 50th
Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing.
Allertonia 2012;2012:1908–13.
[12] Vardakas JS, Zorba N, Verikoukis CV. A survey on demand response in smart
grids: mathematical models and approaches. IEEE Transactions on Industrial
Informatics 2015;11:570–82.
[13] Jensen SØ, Marszal-Pomianowska A, Lollini R, Pasut W, Knotzer A, Engelmann P,
Stafford A, Reynders G. IEA EBC Annex 67 energy flexible buildings. Energy Build
2017;155:25–34.
[14] Biyik E, Kahraman A. A predictive control strategy for optimal management of
peak load, thermal comfort, energy storage and renewables in multi-zone
buildings. Journal of Building Engineering 2019;25:100826.
[15] Ascione F, Bianco N, De Stasio C, Mauro GM, Vanoli GP. Simulation-based model
predictive control by the multi-objective optimization of building energy
performance and thermal comfort. Energy Build 2016;111:131–44.
[16] Maasoumy M, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli A. Smart connected buildings design
automation: foundations and trends. In: Foundations and trends in electronic
design automation; 2015. p. 1–150.
[17] De Coninck R, Magnusson F, Åkesson J, Helsen L. Toolbox for development and
validation of grey-box building models for forecasting and control. Journal of
Building Performance Simulation 2015:1–16.
[18] Gwerder M, Boetschi S, Gyalistras D, Sagerschnig C, David Sturzenegger, Smith R,
Illi B. Integrated predictive rule-based control of a Swiss office building. 11th
REHVA World Congress Clima; 2013. p. 10.
[19] Nghiem TX, Jones CN. Data-driven demand response modeling and control of
buildings with Gaussian processes. In: American control conference. Seattle, WA,
Seattle: (ACC); 2017. p. 2919–24.
[20] Afram A, Janabi-Sharifi F, Fung AS, Raahemifar K. Artificial neural network
(ANN) based model predictive control (MPC) and optimization of HVAC systems:
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
a state of the art review and case study of a residential HVAC system. Energy
Build 2017;141:96–113.
[21] Sturzenegger D, Gyalistras D, Semeraro V, Morari M, Smith RS. BRCM Matlab
Toolbox: model generation for model predictive building control. In: 2014
American control conference; 2014. p. 1063–9.
[22] Sturzenegger D, Gyalistras D, Morari M, Smith RS. Model predictive climate
control of a Swiss office building: implementation, results, and cost-benefit
analysis. IEEE Trans Contr Syst Technol 2016;24:1–12.
[23] Henze GP. Model predictive control for buildings: a quantum leap? Journal of
Building Performance Simulation 2013;6:157–8.
[24] Serale G, Fiorentini M, Capozzoli A, Bernardini D, Bemporad A. Model Predictive
Control (MPC) for enhancing building and HVAC system energy efficiency:
problem formulation, applications and opportunities. Energies 2018;11.
[25] Behl M, Smarra F, Mangharam R, Dr-Advisor. A data-driven demand response
recommender system. Appl Energy 2016;170:30–46.
[26] Ferreira PM, Ruano AE, Silva S, Conceição EZ. Neural networks based predictive
control for thermal comfort and energy savings in public buildings. Energy Build
2012;55:238–51.
[27] Jain A, Smarra F, Mangharam R. Data predictive control using regression trees
and ensemble learning. In: IEEE 56th annual conference on decision and control
(CDC); 2017. p. 4446–51.
[28] Hou Z-S, Wang Z. Information Sciences-2013 from model-based control to data-
driven control. Inf Sci 2016;235:3–35.
[29] Schmidt M, Åhlund C. Smart buildings as Cyber-Physical Systems : data-driven
predictive control strategies for energy efficiency. Renew Sustain Energy Rev
2018;90:742–56.
[30] Amasyali K, Gohary N. A review of data-driven building energy consumption
prediction studies. Renew Sustain Energy Rev 2018;81:1192–205.
[31] Wei Y, Zhang X, Shi Y, Xia L, Pan S, Wu J, Han M, Zhao X. A review of data-driven
approaches for prediction and classification of building energy consumption.
Renew Sustain Energy Rev 2018;82:1027–47.
[32] Deb C, Zhang F, Yang J, Lee SE, Shah KW. A review on time series forecasting
techniques for building energy consumption. Renew Sustain Energy Rev 2017;74:
902–24.
[33] Wang Z, Chen Y. Data-driven modeling of building thermal dynamics:
methodology and state of the art. Energy Build 2019;203:109405.
[34] Maddalena ET, Lian Y, Jones CN. Data-driven methods for building control - A
review and promising future directions. Contr Eng Pract 2020;95:104211.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conengprac.2019.104211.
[35] Afram A, Janabi-Sharifi F. Theory and applications of HVAC control systems - a
review of model predictive control (MPC), Building and Environment, vol. 72;
2014.
[36] Afroz Z, Shafiullah G, Urmee T, Higgins G. Modeling techniques used in building
HVAC control systems: a review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews;
2017.
[37] Hameed P, Bin N, Nor M, Nallagownden P, Elamvazuthi I, Ibrahim T. A review on
optimized control systems for building energy and comfort management of smart
sustainable buildings. Renew Sustain Energy Rev 2014;34:409–29.
[38] Li X, Wen J. Review of building energy modeling for control and operation.
Renew Sustain Energy Rev 2014;37:517–37.
[39] Pallonetto F, Rosa MD, Ettorre FD, Finn DP. On the assessment and control
optimisation of demand response programs in residential buildings. Renewable
and Sustainable Energy Reviews 2020.
[40] Vázquez-Canteli JR, Nagy Z. Reinforcement learning for demand response: a
review of algorithms and modeling techniques. Appl Energy 2019;235:1072–89.
[41] Amara F, Agbossou K, Cardenas A, Dubé Y, Kelouwani S. Comparison and
simulation of building thermal models for effective energy management. Smart
Grid Renew Energy 2015;6:95–112.
[42] Lehmann B, Gyalistras D, Gwerder M, Wirth K, Carl S. Intermediate complexity
model for model predictive control of integrated room Automation. Energy Build
2013;58:250–62.
[43] Aftab M, Chen C, Chau C-K, Rahwan T. Automatic HVAC control with real-time
occupancy recognition and simulation-guided model predictive control in low-
cost embedded system. Energy Build 2017;154:141–56.
[44] Gomez-Romero J, Fernandez-Basso CJ, Cambronero MV, Molina-Solana M,
Campana JR, Ruiz MD, Martin-Bautista MJ. A probabilistic algorithm for
predictive control with full-complexity models in non-residential buildings. IEEE
Access 2019;7. 1–1.
[45] Kontes GD, Giannakis GI, Sánchez V, Agustin-camacho PD, Romero-amorrortu A,
Panagiotidou N. Simulation-based evaluation and optimization of control
strategies in buildings. Energies 2018;11:1–23.
[46] Mirakhorli A, Dong B. Model predictive control for building loads connected with
a residential distribution grid. Appl Energy 2018;230:627–42.
[47] Vrettos E, Oldewurtel F, Vasirani M, Andersson G. Centralized and decentralized
balance group optimization in electricity markets with demand response. IEEE
grenoble conference PowerTech. POWERTECH; 2013.
[48] Li X, Wen J, Bai E-W. Building energy forecasting using system identification
based on system characteristics test, 2015 Workshop on Modeling and Simulation
of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems. MSCPES); 2015. p. 1–6.
[49] Kathirgamanathan A, Rosa MD, Mangina E, Finn DP. Feature assessment in data-
driven models for unlocking building energy flexibility. In: IBPSA BS; 2019. 2-4
September, 2019, Rome, Italy., Rome.
[50] Yin R, Kara EC, Li Y, DeForest N, Wang K, Yong T, Stadler M. Quantifying
flexibility of commercial and residential loads for demand response using setpoint
changes. Appl Energy 2016;177:149–64.
15
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
[51] Kara EC, Tabone MD, MacDonald JS, Callaway DS, Kiliccote S. Quantifying
flexibility of residential thermostatically controlled loads for demand response.
Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Embedded Systems for Energy-
Efficient Buildings - BuildSys 2014;’14:140–7.
[52] D.-S. Kapetanakis, O. Neu, D. P. Finn, Prediction of residential building demand
response potential using data-driven techniques, in: Proc. Of BS2017: 15th
conference of international building performance simulation association, San
Fransisco, USA, Aug 7-9, San Fransisco.
[53] Prívara S, Váňa Z, Žáčeková E, Cigler J. Building modeling: selection of the most
appropriate model for predictive control. Energy Build 2012;55:341–50.
[54] Prívara S, Cigler J, Váňa Z, Oldewurtel F, Sagerschnig C, Žáčeková E. Building
modeling as a crucial part for building predictive control. Energy Build 2013;56:
8–22.
[55] Bacher P, Madsen H. Identifying suitable models for the heat dynamics of
buildings. Energy Build 2011;43:1511–22.
[56] Behl M, Jain A, Mangharam R. Data-driven modeling, control and tools for cyber-
physical energy systems. In: ACM/IEEE 7th international conference on cyber-
physical systems, ICCPS 2016 - proceedings (2016); 2016.
[57] Lee EA. Cyber physical systems: design challenges, technical report. University of
California at Berkeley; 2008.
[58] Rockett P, Hathway EA. Model-predictive control for non-domestic buildings: a
critical review and prospects. Build Res Inf 2017;45:556–71.
[59] Macarulla M, Casals M, Forcada N, Gangolells M. Implementation of predictive
control in a commercial building energy management system using neural
networks. Energy Build 2017;151:511–9.
[60] Manandhar K, Cao X. Optimizing load schedule for building energy management
in smart grids. In: 24th international conference on computer communication and
networks (ICCCN); 2015. p. 1–7.
[61] F. Smarra, A. Jain, R. Mangharam, A. D. Innocenzo, Data-driven switched affine
modeling for model predictive control, in: IFAC conference on analysis and design
of hybrid systems ADHS 2018, July, Oxford, United Kingdom.
[62] Shang C, You F. A data-driven robust optimization approach to scenario-based
stochastic model predictive control. J Process Contr 2019;75:24–39.
[63] Mason K, Grijalva S. A review of reinforcement learning for autonomous building
energy management. Comput Electr Eng 2019;78:300–12.
[64] Sutton RS, Barton A G. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. second ed.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; 2014.
[65] Costanzo GT, Iacovella S, Ruelens F, Leurs T, Claessens BJ. Experimental analysis
of data-driven control for a building heating system. Sustainable Energy, Grids
and Networks 2016;6:81–90.
[66] Wei T, Wang Y, Zhu Q. Deep reinforcement learning for building HVAC control.
54th ACM/EDAC/IEEE design automation conference. (DAC); 2017. p. 1–6.
[67] Li Z, Dong B. Short term predictions of occupancy in commercial buildings -
performance analysis for stochastic models and machine learning approaches.
Energy Build 2018;158:268–81.
[68] Kleiminger W, Mattern F, Santini S. Predicting household occupancy for smart
heating control: a comparative performance analysis of state-of-the-art
approaches. Energy Build 2014;85:493–505.
[69] Tian W, Heo Y, de Wilde P, Li Z, Yan D, Park CS, Feng X, Augenbroe G. A review
of uncertainty analysis in building energy assessment. Renew Sustain Energy Rev
2018;93:285–301.
[70] Coakley D, Raftery P, Keane M. A review of methods to match building energy
simulation models to measured data. Renew Sustain Energy Rev 2014;37:123–41.
[71] Allen J, Halberstadt A, Powers J, El-farra NH. Supervisory model predictive
control of flexible building loads with on-site solar generation. Milwaukee, USA:
Wisconsin Center; 2018. p. 4622–7.
[72] Aoun N, Bavière R, Vallée M, Aurousseau A, Sandou G. Modelling and flexible
predictive control of building space-heating demand in district heating systems.
Energy 2019;188:116042.
[73] Bianchini G, Casini M, Pepe D, Vicino A, Zanvettor GG. An integrated model
predictive control approach for optimal HVAC and energy storage operation in
large-scale buildings. Appl Energy 2019;240:327–40.
[74] Bunning F, Huber B, Heer P, Aboudonia A, Lygeros J. Experimental
demonstration of data predictive control for energy optimization and thermal
comfort in buildings211. Energy and Buildings; 2020, 109792.
[75] Bürger A, Bohlayer M, Hoffmann S, Altmann-Dieses A, Braun M, Diehl M.
A whole-year simulation study on nonlinear mixed-integer model predictive
control for a thermal energy supply system with multi-use components258.
Applied Energy; 2020, 114064.
[76] Cigler J, Prívara S, Váňa Z, Žáčeková E, Ferkl L. Optimization of predicted mean
Vote index within model predictive control framework : computationally
tractable solution. Energy Build 2012;52:39–49.
[77] Cigler J, Siroky J, Korda M, Jones CN. On the selection of the most appropriate
MPC problem. In: Proceedings of 11th rehva world congress; 2013. Clima.
[78] Coetzee S. Predictive residential energy management with photovoltaic power
generation and battery energy storage. Ph.D. thesis. Stellenbosch University;
2019.
[79] Cotrufo N, Saloux E, Hardy JM, Candanedo JA, Platon R. A practical artificial
intelligence-based approach for predictive control in commercial and
institutional buildings. Energy Build 2020;206:109563.
[80] F. Cui, Borui; Fan, Cheng; Xiao, Development of a scheme for assessment of
demand response potential using distributed sensor networks for residential flat,
in: CLIMA 2016 - proceedings of the 12th REHVA world congress, Aalborg,
Denmark.
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
[81] De Coninck R, Helsen L. Bottom-Up quantification of the flexibility potential of
buildings, 13th conference of international building performance simulation
association. Chambéry, France 2013:3250–8. August 26-28.
[82] De Coninck R, Helsen L. Quantification of flexibility in buildings by cost curves -
methodology and application. Appl Energy 2016;162:653–65.
[83] De Coninck R, Helsen L. Practical implementation and evaluation of model
predictive control for an office building in Brussels. Energy Build 2016;111:
290–8.
[84] Dong B, Lam KP. A real-time model predictive control for building heating and
cooling systems based on the occupancy behavior pattern detection and local
weather forecasting. Building Simulation 2014;7:89–106.
[85] Drgon̆a J, Picard D, Kvasnica M, Helsen L. Approximate model predictive building
control via machine learning. Appl Energy 2018;218:199–216.
[86] J. Drgon̆a, L. Helsen, D. L. Vrabie, Stripping off the implementation complexity of
physics-based model predictive control for buildings via deep learning, in: 33rd
conference on neural information processing systems (NeurIPS 2019), Vancouver,
Canada., NeurIPS.
[87] Finck C, Li R, Kramer R, Zeiler W. Quantifying demand flexibility of power-to-
heat and thermal energy storage in the control of building heating systems. Appl
Energy 2017;209:409–25.
[88] Garnier A, Eynard J, Caussanel M, Grieu S. Predictive control of multizone
heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems in non-residential buildings.
Applied Soft Computing Journal 2015;37:847–62.
[89] Hilliard T, Swan L, Qin Z. Experimental implementation of whole building MPC
with zone based thermal comfort adjustments. Build Environ 2017;125:326–38.
[90] Hu M, Xiao F, Jørgensen JB, Li R. Price-responsive model predictive control of
floor heating systems for demand response using building thermal mass. Appl
Therm Eng 2019;153:316–29.
[91] Huang H, Chen L, Hu E. A hybrid model predictive control scheme for energy and
cost savings in commercial buildings: simulation and experiment. Proc Am Contr
Conf 2015:256–61.
[92] Jain A, Nghiem T, Morari M, Mangharam R. Learning and control using Gaussian
processes. Proceedings - 9th ACM/IEEE international conference on cyber-
physical systems. ICCPS; 2018. p. 140–9.
[93] Jain A, Behl M, Mangharam R. Data predictive control for building energy
management. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM international conference on systems
for energy-efficient built environments - BuildSys, vol. 16; 2016. p. 245–6.
[94] Jain A, Nong D, Nghiem TX, Mangharam R. Digital twins for efficient modeling
and control OF buildings an integrated solution with SCADA systems. In: Building
performance modeling conference and SimBuild, co-organized by ASHRAE and
IBPSA-USA chicago, IL; 2018. September 26-28, 2018, Chicago, IL, USA.
[95] Jain A. Data-driven model predictive control with regression trees - an
application to building energy management. ACM Trans. Cyber-Phys. Syst 2018;
2:1–21.
[96] Joe J, Karava P. A model predictive control strategy to optimize the performance
of radiant floor heating and cooling systems in office buildings. Appl Energy
2019;245:65–77.
[97] Kahraman A, Biyik E. Optimal control of building HVAC loads for demand
response participation. In: 3rd South East European conference on sustainable
development of energy, water and environment systems, Novi Sad, Serbia; June
30-July 4, 2018.
[98] Karg B, Lucia S. Deep learning-based embedded mixed-integer model predictive
control. In: Proc. Of the European control conference. Cyprus: Limassol; 2016.
2075–2080.
[99] Killian M, Kozek M. Implementation of cooperative Fuzzy model predictive
control for an energy-efficient office building. Energy Build 2018;158:1404–16.
[100] Knudsen MD, Petersen S. Demand response potential of model predictive control
of space heating based on price and carbon dioxide intensity signals. Energy Build
2016;125:196–204.
[101] Lee D, Lim MC, Negash L, Choi H-l. EPPY based building Co-simulation for model
predictive control of HVAC optimization, 2018 18th international conference on
control, automation and systems. (ICCAS); 2018. p. 1051–5.
[102] Lee S, Joe J, Karava P, Bilionis I, Tzempelikos A. Implementation of a self-tuned
HVAC controller to satisfy occupant thermal preferences and optimize energy use.
Energy Build 2019;194:301–16.
[103] Li Y, Han Y, Wang J, Zhao Q. A MBCRF algorithm based on ensemble learning for
building demand response considering the thermal comfort. Energies 2018;11:
3495.
[104] Liu Y, Yu N, Wang W, Guan X, Xu Z, Dong B, Liu T. Coordinating the operations of
smart buildings in smart grids. Appl Energy 2018;228:2510–25.
[105] Luzi M, Vaccarini M, Lemma M. A tuning methodology of Model Predictive
Control design for energy efficient building thermal control. Journal of Building
Engineering 2019;21:28–36.
[106] Maasoumy M, Rosenberg C, Sangiovanni-vincentelli A, Callaway DS. Model
predictive control approach to online computation of demand-side flexibility of
commercial buildings HVAC systems for supply following. In: American control
conference; 2014. p. 1082–9.
[107] M. Maasoumy, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, A. Pinto, Model-based hierarchical
optimal control design for HVAC systems, in: Proceedings of the ASME 2011
Dynamic Systems and Control Conference (DSCC) October 31 - November 2,
2011, Arlington, VA, USA.
[108] Mai W, Chung CY. Economic MPC of aggregating commercial buildings for
providing flexible power reserve. IEEE Trans Power Syst 2015;30:2685–94.
[109] Marvuglia A, Messineo A, Nicolosi G. Coupling a neural network temperature
predictor and a fuzzy logic controller to perform thermal comfort regulation in an
office building. Build Environ 2014;72:287–99.
16
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
[110] Masy G, Georges E, Verhelst C, Lemort V, André P. Smart grid energy flexible
buildings through the use of heat pumps and building thermal mass as energy
storage in the Belgian context. Science and Technology for the Built Environment
2015;21:800–11.
[111] Mirakhorli A, Dong B. Occupant-behavior driven appliance scheduling for
residential buildings. Building Simulation 2017;10:917–31.
[112] Mocanu E, Mocanu DC, Nguyen PH, Liotta A, Webber ME, Gibescu M,
Slootweg JG. On-line building energy optimization using deep reinforcement
learning. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid 2019;10:3698–708.
[113] Ogata Y, Namerikawa T. Energy management of smart home by model predictive
control based on EV state prediction. In: 2019 12th Asian Control Conference
(ASCC). JSME; 2019. p. 410–5.
[114] Oldewurtel F, Ulbig A, Parisio A, Andersson G, Morari M. Reducing peak
electricity demand in building climate control using real-time pricing and model
predictive control, 2010 49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
2010. p. 1927–32.
[115] Oldewurtel F, Parisio A, Jones CN, Gyalistras D, Gwerder M, Stauch V,
Lehmann B, Morari M. Use of model predictive control and weather forecasts for
energy efficient building climate control. Energy Build 2012;45:15–27.
[116] Oldewurtel F, Borsche T, Bucher M, Fortenbacher P, Gonzalez-Vayá M, Haring T,
Mathieu JL, Mégel O, Vrettos E, Andersson G. A framework for and assessment of
demand response and energy storage in power systems. IREP Symp. - Bulk Power
Syst. Dyn. Control - 2013;IX:1–24.
[117] Oldewurtel F, Ulbig A, Morari M, Andersson G. Building control and storage
management with dynamic tariffs for shaping demand response. In: IEEE PES
innovative smart grid technologies conference Europe; 2011. p. 1–8.
[118] Pavlak GS, Henze GP, Cushing VJ. Optimizing commercial building participation
in energy and ancillary service markets. Energy Build 2014;81:115–26.
[119] T. Péan, J. Salom, R. Costa-castelló, Configurations of model predictive control to
exploit energy flexibility in building thermal loads, in: IEEE conference on
decision and control (CDC), pp. 3177–3182.
[120] Pippia T, Lago J, Coninck RD, Sijs J, Schutter BD. Scenario-based model
predictive control approach for heating systems in an office building. 2019 IEEE
15th international conference on automation science and engineering (CASE).
IEEE; 2019. p. 1243–8.
[121] Radhakrishnan N, Su Y, Su R, Poolla K. Token based scheduling for energy
management in building HVAC systems. Appl Energy 2016;173:67–79.
[122] Razmara M, Maasoumy M, Shahbakhti M, Robinett RD. Optimal exergy control of
building HVAC system. Appl Energy 2015;156:555–65.
[123] Reynolds J, Rezgui Y, Kwan A, Piriou S. A zone-level, building energy
optimisation combining an artificial neural network, a genetic algorithm, and
model predictive control. Energy 2018;151:729–39.
[124] Risbeck MJ. Mixed-Integer model predictive control with applications to building
energy systems by. Ph.D. thesis. University of Wisconsin-Madison; 2018.
[125] Robillart M, Schalbart P, Chaplais F, Peuportier B. Model reduction and model
predictive control of energy-efficient buildings for electrical heating load shifting.
J Process Contr 2019;74:23–34.
[126] Ruano AE, Pesteh S, Silva S, Duarte H, Mestre G, Ferreira PM, Khosravani HR,
Horta R. The IMBPC HVAC system: a complete MBPC solution for existing HVAC
systems. Energy Build 2016;120:145–58.
[127] Ruelens F, Iacovella S, Claessens BJ, Belmans R. Learning agent for a heat-pump
thermostat with a set-back strategy using model-free reinforcement learning.
Energies 2015;8:8300–18.
[128] Salakij S, Yu N, Paolucci S, Antsaklis P. Model-Based Predictive Control for
building energy management. I: energy modeling and optimal control. Energy
Build 2016;133:345–58.
[129] Sampaio PR, Salvazet R, Mandel P, Becker G, Chenu D. Simulation and optimal
control of heating and cooling systems: a case study of a commercial building.
2019. arXiv:1910.01488v1 [eess.SY].
[130] Shi J, Yu N, Yao W. Energy efficient building HVAC control algorithm with real-
time occupancy prediction. Energy Procedia 2017;111:267–76.
[131] Široky J, Oldewurtel F, Cigler J, Prívara S. Experimental analysis of model
predictive control for an energy efficient building heating system. Appl Energy
2011;88:3079–87.
[132] Smarra F, Jain A, Rubeis TD, Ambrosini D, Innocenzo AD, Mangharam R. Data-
driven model predictive control using random forests for building energy
optimization and climate control. Appl Energy 2018:1–21.
[133] D. Sturzenegger, D. Gyalistras, M. Gwerder, C. Sagerschnig, M. Morari, R. S.
Smith, Model predictive control of a Swiss office building, in: 11th REHVA world
congress and 8th international conference ”Energy Efficient, Smart and Healthy
Buildings”, Prague, CZ, p. 10.
[134] Tabares-Velasco PC, Speake A, Harris M, Newman A, Vincent T, Lanahan M.
A modeling framework for optimization-based control of a residential building
thermostat for time-of-use pricing. Appl Energy 2019;242:1346–57.
[135] Tang R, Wang S. Model predictive control for thermal energy storage and thermal
comfort optimization of building demand response in smart grids. Appl Energy
2019;242:873–82.
[136] Tariq ZB, Imam MHT, Kar K, Mishra S. Experimental evaluation of data-driven
predictive indoor thermal management. New York, NY, USA: ACM; 2014.
p. 531–5.
[137] Touretzky CR, Baldea M. Nonlinear model reduction and model predictive control
of residential buildings with energy recovery. J Process Contr 2014;24:723–39.
[138] Valenzuela PE, Ebadat A, Everitt N, Parisio A, Member S. Closed-loop
identification for model predictive control of HVAC systems : from input design to
controller synthesis. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology; 2019.
p. 1–15.
A. Kathirgamanathan et al.
[139] Vande M, Coninck RD, Helsen L. Setting up a framework for model predictive
control with moving horizon state estimation using JModelica. In: Proceedings of
the 10th International Modelica Conference; March 10-12 2014. p. 1295–303.
Lund, Sweden.
[140] Vanhoudt D, Claessens B, Salenbien R, Desmedt J. The use of distributed thermal
storage in district heating grids for demand side management. 2017. arXiv:
1702.06005v1 [cs.SY].
[141] Vázquez-canteli J, Ulyanin S, Kämpf J, Nagy Z. Fusing TensorFlow with building
energy simulation for intelligent energy management in smart cities. Sustainable
Cities and Society; 2018.
[142] Viot H, Sempey A, Mora L, Batsale JC, Malvestio J. Model predictive control of a
thermally activated building system to improve energy management of an
experimental building : Part II - potential of predictive strategy. Energy Build
2018;172:385–96.
[143] Vrettos E, Oldewurtel F, Andersson G. Robust energy-constrained frequency
reserves from aggregations of commercial buildings. IEEE Trans Power Syst 2016;
31:4272–85.
[144] Vrettos E. Control of Residential and Commercial Loads for Power System
Ancillary services. Ph.D. thesis. ETH Zurich; 2016.
[145] Vrettos E, Andersson G. Scheduling and provision of secondary frequency reserves
by aggregations of commercial buildings. IEEE Transactions on Sustainable
Energy 2016;7:850–64.
[146] Vrettos E, Kara EC, MacDonald J, Andersson G, Callaway DS. Experimental
demonstration of frequency regulation by commercial buildings - Part I: modeling
and hierarchical control design. 2016. p. 1–24. arXiv:1605.05835v1 [math.OC].
[147] Wolisz H, Kull TM, Muller D, Kurnitski J. Self-learning model predictive control
for dynamic activation of structural thermal mass in residential buildings. Energy
and Buildings; 2019.
[148] Xu G. HVAC system study : a data-driven approach. Ph.D. thesis. The University of
Iowa; 2012.
[149] Zeng Y, Zhang Z, Kusiak A. Predictive modeling and optimization of a multi-zone
HVAC system with data mining and firefly algorithms. Energy 2015;86:393–402.
[150] Zhang T, Wan MP, Ng BF, Yang S. Model predictive control for building energy
reduction and temperature regulation. IEEE Green Technologies Conference.
IEEE; April 2018. p. 100–6.
[151] Zhang X, Vrettos E, Kamgarpour M, Andersson G, Lygeros J. Stochastic frequency
reserve provision by chance-constrained control of commercial buildings. In:
2015 European Control Conference. (ECC); 2015. p. 1134–40.
[152] Zhang X, Schildbach G, Sturzenegger D, Morari M. Scenario-based MPC for
energy-efficient building climate control under weather and occupancy
uncertainty. In: European Control Conference. (ECC); 2013. p. 1029–34.
17
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110120
[153] Zhang Z, Chong A, Pan Y, Zhang C, Lam KP. Whole building energy model for
HVAC optimal control: a practical framework based on deep reinforcement
learning. Energy Build 2019;199:472–90.
[154] Zhou D, Hu Q, Tomlin CJ. Model comparison of a data-driven and a physical
model for simulating HVAC systems. arXiv preprint; 2016.
[155] Zhou S, Zou F, Wu Z, Gu W. Potential of model-free control for demand-side
management considering real-time pricing. Energies 2019;12:2587.
[156] Zhuang J, Chen Y, Chen X. A new simplified modeling method for model
predictive control in a medium-sized commercial building : a case study. Build
Environ 2018;127:1–12.
[157] Zong Y, Martin G, Mirra R, You S, Hu J, Han X. Challenges of implementing
economic model predictive control strategy for buildings interacting with smart
energy systems. Appl Therm Eng 2017;114:1476–86.
[158] Iria J, Soares F. Real-time provision of multiple electricity market products by an
aggregator of prosumers. Appl Energy 2019;255:113792.
[159] T. Borsche, F. Oldewurtel, G. Andersson, Scenario-based MPC for energy schedule
compliance with demand response, in: IFAC Proceedings Volumes (IFAC-
PapersOnline), volume 19, pp. 10299–10304.
[160] Borsche T, Oldewurtel F, Andersson G. Balance group optimization by scenario-
based day-ahead scheduling and demand response, 2013 4th IEEE/PES
Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Europe. ISGT Europe 2013:1–5.
[161] Weron R. Electricity price forecasting: a review of the state-of-the-art with a look
into the future. Int J Forecast 2014;30:1030–81.
[162] Buttitta G, Finn DP. A high-temporal resolution residential building occupancy
model to generate high-temporal resolution heating load profiles of occupancy-
integrated archetypes. Energy Build 2020;206:109577.
[163] Miller C. More buildings make more generalizable models - benchmarking
prediction methods on open electrical meter data. Machine Learning and
Knowledge Extraction 2019;1:974–93.
[164] Vázquez-Canteli JR, Kämpf J, Henze G, Nagy Z. CityLearn v1.0: an OpenAI gym
environment for demand response with deep reinforcement learning. Build 2019:
356–7. Proceedings of the 6th ACM international conference on systems for
energy-efficient buildings, cities, and transportation.
[165] Tsiropoulos I, Tarvydas D, Lebedeva N. Li-ion batteries for mobility and
stationary storage applications, JRC Science for Policy Report. EU Commission.,
Technical Report. Luxembourg: European Commission; 2018.
[166] Bunsen T, Cazzola P, D’Amore L, Gorner M, Scheffer S, Schuitmaker R, et al.
Global EV outlook 2019, Technical Report. International Energy Agency; 2019.
[167] International Energy Agency (IEA). Market report series: renewables 2017,
analysis and forecasts to 2022. Technical Report, IEA; 2017.
[168] Daneshazarian R, Cuce E, Cuce PM, Sher F. Concentrating photovoltaic thermal
(CPVT) collectors and systems: theory, performance assessment and applications.
Renew Sustain Energy Rev 2018;81:473–92.