Delivering holistic energy-saving operation for heterogeneous all-parallel chiller plant systems through two-stage optimization assisted by input convex neural networks

With the rapid growth of building cooling demand and energy consumption, the potential for energy-saving operations gave rise to the popularity of implementing heterogeneous all-parallel chiller plant systems in large-scale public buildings. Meanwhile, heterogeneity, multi-dimensionality, and tight coupling interactions considerably complicate the holistically optimal operation of the system. Although artificial neural networks (ANN) have achieved great success in complex system identification, the endogenous non-convexity of classical feedforward neural networks (FNN), which are widely applied in model-based optimization for chiller plant operation, makes conventional optimizers prone to falling into local optima, forcing previous methodologies to sacrifice model precision for computational tractability. In this study, a special type of ANN named input convex neural network (ICNN) was leveraged to identify five individual convex models for energy-consuming units in the chiller plant system, providing convex input-output mappings while preserving high-resolution representations. Then, a two-stage optimizer with a sequential integration of a global searcher and a local optimizer was developed to effectively solve the holistic energy-saving problem by optimizing ten decision variables including chilled water supply temperature, partial load ratio of chillers, speed ratios of pumps and cooling tower fans, cooling water flow rate of cooling towers, and on/off states of devices. Finally, the methodology was deployed to a case study using on-site operation data and was compared with conventional candidates. Average holistic energy-saving ratios of 13.37% and 9.14% were achieved with average runtimes of 1.12 s and 1.07 s by the proposed optimizer in the high-load and light-load scenarios, respectively, showcasing more advantageous in resolving the operation optimization of complicated chiller plant systems.