A Control-Oriented Building Envelope and HVAC System Simulation Model for a Typical Large Office Building

In this paper, we present a dynamic simulation model for a typical large office building in the U.S., which can be used as a virtual testbed to enable advanced control research for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) sys- tems. We employed EnergyPlus for calculating the build- ing thermal load, and the Modelica Buildings library to model the dynamic behavior of the HVAC system. We used a functional mockup interface to enable run-time communication between the EnergyPlus model and the Modelica model. This simulation model can be driven by control inputs from the supervisory decision-making al- gorithms for advanced control system design and perfor- mance evaluation. To demonstrate the usage of the model, we performed the evaluation on two representative control sequences for large office buildings with this model. Sim- ulation data allows us to compare the energy performance of these two sequences and captures the evolution of the system dynamics at a high temporal granularity.