Tech Reports

ULCS-15-006

Heuristics for the Cost-Effective Management of a Temperature Controlled Environment (accepted paper in IEEE ISGT ASIA 2015)

Mohamed Arikiez, Floriana Grasso and Michele Zito


Abstract

This study investigates the use of linear programming based heuristics for solving particular energy allocation problems. The main objective is to minimize the cost of using a collection of air conditioning units in a residential or commercial building also, keeping the inside temperature within preset comfort levels. Optimal methods do not scale well when the number of appliances or the system time granularity grows past a certain threshold. We find that heuristics based on relaxation and rounding offer a good trade-off between cost and computation time is needed.

[Full Paper]