Energy consumption control automation using Artificial Neural Networks and adaptive algorithms: Proposal of a new methodology and case study

Energy consumption control in energy intensive companies is always more considered as a critical activity to continuously improve energy performance. It undoubtedly requires a huge effort in data gathering and analysis, and the amount of these data together with the scarceness of human resources devoted to Energy Management activities who could maintain and update the analyses’ output are often the main barriers to its diffusion in companies. Advanced tools such as software based on machine learning techniques are therefore the key to overcome these barriers and allow an easy but accurate control. This type of systems is able to solve complex problems obtaining reliable results over time, but not to understand when the reliability of the results is declining (a common situation considering energy using systems, often undergoing structural changes) and to automatically adapt itself using a limited amount of training data, so that a completely automatic application is not yet available and the automatic energy consumption control using intelligent systems is still a challenge. This paper presents a whole new approach to energy consumption control, proposing a methodology based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and aimed at creating an automatic energy consumption control system. First of all, three different structures of neural networks are proposed and trained using a huge amount of data. Three different performance indicators are then used to identify the most suitable structure, which is implemented to create an energy consumption control tool. In addition, considering that huge amount of data are not always available in practice, a method to identify the minimum period of data collection to obtain reliable results and the maximum period of usability is described. The general purpose of the work is to allow the automatic utilization of this kind of tools, so a method to identify a lack of accuracy in the model and two different retraining methods are proposed and compared (Mobile Training and Growing Training). The whole approach is eventually applied to the case study of a tertiary building in Rome (Italy).