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Record W4411169691 · doi:10.1177/01436244251339726

Deriving optimal direct load control sequences for HVAC systems of small commercial buildings

2025· article· en· W4411169691 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueBuilding Services Engineering Research and Technology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicBuilding Energy and Comfort Optimization
Canadian institutionsNational Research Council CanadaCarleton University
FundersNational Research Council Canada
KeywordsHVACAutomotive engineeringEnvironmental scienceComputer scienceControl (management)EngineeringControl theory (sociology)Architectural engineeringMechanical engineeringAir conditioning

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Direct load control (DLC) for building HVAC systems, through preconditioning and setup/setback sequences, can substantially reduce electricity consumption during peak periods. Yet, the effectiveness of a DLC sequence strictly depends on the thermophysical attributes of a building and its occupants’ tolerance to variations in the thermal environment. The current one-size-fits-all approach to DLC disregards the inter-building diversity of these factors. This paper demonstrates the inter-building diversity of preconditioning and setup/setback needs by deriving unique DLC sequences for different buildings. To this end, variants of an EnergyPlus model representing a small commercial building in Toronto, Ontario are created by altering its envelope, HVAC capacity, and occupants’ temperature preference characteristics. Through a metaheuristic search, personalized DLC sequences that minimize the HVAC-related electricity costs and the time spent outside a preferred temperature range are estimated for each variant. These personalized DLC sequences were compared with six baseline DLC sequences. Unlike the baseline DLC sequences, the optimal sequences could attain an average of 20% reduction in HVAC-related electricity costs while keeping the time spent outside the preferred temperature ranges under 3% for all variants. Practical application This paper presents an optimization method to derive unique direct load control sequences demonstrating the inter-building diversity of preconditioning and setup/setback needs. The method is tested on a range of buildings with varying characteristics in a simulation environment. The findings of the study are useful in the domains of HVAC controls, demand response, and electrification of HVAC systems.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.236
Threshold uncertainty score0.880

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.254
Teacher spread0.243 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it