cost of ODS is reduced by 20% of ODC’s in the one
month of July 2015. Furthermore, the number of heat
pumps required by ODS is less than that required by
ODC, which means that the cost of installation and
facilities will be significantly reduced if building ma-
nager adopts ODS approach.
5 CONCLUSION
In this paper, the operation of solar thermal system
within a building has been studied with a view to re-
duce the cost of electricity to the building manager.
Two control strategies including ODC and ODS ap-
proaches have been developed based on real data from
a facility in Singapore. In designing the strategies,
three different kinds of scenarios have been conside-
red, and the necessary number of heat pumps that is
needed to meet the demand of the building is identi-
fied. It has been shown that if the prior knowledge of
the weather condition and are available, ODS techni-
que is more effective compared to the ODC appro-
ach in terms of electricity cost reduction and increa-
sing energy efficiency. However, if such knowledge
is unavailable, ODC technique has been shown to be
still suitable for running the considered real system
and numerical solutions have been provided to sup-
port our claims.
In the future works, we will involve the prediction
methods in order to capture the prior knowledge of the
weather condition and demand, and consider various
possible scenarios such as dynamic pricing and peak
demand shifting.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported in part by the project fun-
ded by National Research Foundation (NRF) via the
Green Buildings Innovation Cluster (GBIC), adminis-
tered by Building and Construction Authority (BCA),
and in part by the SUTD-MIT International Design
Centre (IDC; idc.sutd.edu.sg).
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