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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Musgrave, Laura, Bhattacharjee, Arnab, Saha, Tapan Kumar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14160
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Table of Contents:
  • This work presents a case study of optimal energy management of a large Heating Ventilation and Cooling (HVAC) system within a university campus in Australia using Reinforcement Learning (RL). The HVAC system supplies to nine university buildings with an annual average electricity consumption of $\sim2$ GWh. Updated chiller Coefficient of Performance (COP) curves are identified, and a predictive building cooling demand model is developed using historical data from the HVAC system. Based on these inputs, a Proximal Policy Optimization based RL model is trained to optimally schedule the chillers in a receding horizon control framework with a priority reward function for constraint satisfaction. Compared to the traditional way of controlling the HVAC system based on a reactive rule-based method, the proposed controller saves up to 28\% of the electricity consumed by simply controlling the mass flow rates of the chiller banks and with minimal constraint violations.