scholarly journals An Exact Algorithm for the Optimal Chiller Loading Problem and Its Application to the Optimal Chiller Sequencing Problem

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (23) ◽  
pp. 6372
Author(s):  
Federica Acerbi ◽  
Mirco Rampazzo ◽  
Giuseppe De Nicolao

The optimal management of multiple chiller systems calls for the solution of the so-called optimal chiller loading (OCL) problem. Due to the interplay of continuous and logical constraints, OCL is an NP-hard problem, so that a variety of heuristic algorithms have been proposed in the literature. Herein, an algorithm for its exact solution, named X-OCL, is developed under the assumption that the chillers’ power consumption curves are quadratic. The proposed method hinges on a decomposition of the solution space so that the overall OCL problem is decomposed to a set of equality constrained quadratic programming problems that can be solved in closed form. By applying the new X-OCL solver to well known case studies, we assess and compare the performances of several literature algorithms, highlighting also some errors in the published results. Moreover, X-OCL is used to design a greedy optimal chiller sequencing (OCS) solver, called X-OCS. The X-OCS is tested on two literature benchmarks and on the model of the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system of a semiconductor plant, over a two-year period. The performances of X-OCS are remarkably close to the theoretical optimal performance.

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zelin Nie ◽  
Feng Gao ◽  
Chao-Bo Yan

Reducing the energy consumption of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems while ensuring users’ comfort is of both academic and practical significance. However, the-state-of-the-art of the optimization model of the HVAC system is that either the thermal dynamic model is simplified as a linear model, or the optimization model of the HVAC system is single-timescale, which leads to heavy computation burden. To balance the practicality and the overhead of computation, in this paper, a multi-timescale bilinear model of HVAC systems is proposed. To guarantee the consistency of models in different timescales, the fast timescale model is built first with a bilinear form, and then the slow timescale model is induced from the fast one, specifically, with a bilinear-like form. After a simplified replacement made for the bilinear-like part, this problem can be solved by a convexification method. Extensive numerical experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of this model.


2022 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Franco Maria Nardini ◽  
Roberto Trani ◽  
Rossano Venturini

Modern search services often provide multiple options to rank the search results, e.g., sort “by relevance”, “by price” or “by discount” in e-commerce. While the traditional rank by relevance effectively places the relevant results in the top positions of the results list, the rank by attribute could place many marginally relevant results in the head of the results list leading to poor user experience. In the past, this issue has been addressed by investigating the relevance-aware filtering problem, which asks to select the subset of results maximizing the relevance of the attribute-sorted list. Recently, an exact algorithm has been proposed to solve this problem optimally. However, the high computational cost of the algorithm makes it impractical for the Web search scenario, which is characterized by huge lists of results and strict time constraints. For this reason, the problem is often solved using efficient yet inaccurate heuristic algorithms. In this article, we first prove the performance bounds of the existing heuristics. We then propose two efficient and effective algorithms to solve the relevance-aware filtering problem. First, we propose OPT-Filtering, a novel exact algorithm that is faster than the existing state-of-the-art optimal algorithm. Second, we propose an approximate and even more efficient algorithm, ϵ-Filtering, which, given an allowed approximation error ϵ, finds a (1-ϵ)–optimal filtering, i.e., the relevance of its solution is at least (1-ϵ) times the optimum. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the two proposed algorithms against state-of-the-art competitors on two real-world public datasets. Experimental results show that OPT-Filtering achieves a significant speedup of up to two orders of magnitude with respect to the existing optimal solution, while ϵ-Filtering further improves this result by trading effectiveness for efficiency. In particular, experiments show that ϵ-Filtering can achieve quasi-optimal solutions while being faster than all state-of-the-art competitors in most of the tested configurations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 5122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nam-Chul Seong ◽  
Jee-Heon Kim ◽  
Wonchang Choi

This study is aimed at developing a real-time optimal control strategy for variable air volume (VAV) air-conditioning in a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system using genetic algorithms and a simulated large-scale office building. The two selected control variables are the settings for the supply air temperature and the duct static pressure to provide optimal control for the VAV air-conditioning system. Genetic algorithms were employed to calculate the optimal control settings for each control variable. The proposed optimal control conditions were evaluated according to the total energy consumption of the HVAC system based on its component parts (fan, chiller, and cold-water pump). The results confirm that the supply air temperature and duct static pressure change according to the cooling load of the simulated building. Using the proposed optimal control variables, the total energy consumption of the building was reduced up to 5.72% compared to under ‘normal’ settings and conditions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 2391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chang-Ming Lin ◽  
Hsin-Yu Liu ◽  
Ko-Ying Tseng ◽  
Sheng-Fuu Lin

The objective of this study was to develop a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system optimization control strategy involving fan coil unit (FCU) temperature control for energy conservation in chilled water systems to enhance the operating efficiency of HVAC systems. The proposed control strategy involves three techniques, which are described as follows. The first technique is an algorithm for dynamic FCU temperature setting, which enables the FCU temperature to be set in accordance with changes in the outdoor temperature to satisfy the indoor thermal comfort for occupants. The second technique is an approach for determining the indoor cold air demand, which collects the set FCU temperature and converts it to the refrigeration ton required for the chilled water system; this serves as the control target for ensuring optimal HVAC operation. The third technique is a genetic algorithm for calculating the minimum energy consumption for an HVAC system. The genetic algorithm determines the pump operating frequency associated with minimum energy consumption per refrigeration ton to control energy conservation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HVAC system optimization control strategy combining FCU temperature control, this study conducted a field experiment. The results revealed that the proposed strategy enabled an HVAC system to achieve 39.71% energy conservation compared with an HVAC system operating at full load.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yassine Meraihi ◽  
Mohammed Mahseur ◽  
Dalila Acheli

The graph coloring problem (GCP) is a well-known classical combinatorial optimization problem in graph theory. It is known to be an NP-Hard problem, so many heuristic algorithms have been employed to solve this problem. This article proposes a modified binary crow search algorithm (MBCSA) to solve the graph coloring problem. First, the binary crow search algorithm is obtained from the original crow search algorithm using the V-shaped transfer function and the discretization method. Second, we use chaotic maps to choose the right values of the flight length (FL) and the awareness probability (AP). Third, we adopt the Gaussian distribution method to replace the random variables used for updating the position of the crows. The aim of these contributions is to avoid the premature convergence to local optima and ensure the diversity of the solutions. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, we use the well-known DIMACS benchmark graph coloring instances. The simulation results reveal the efficiency of our proposed algorithm in comparison with other existing algorithms in the literature.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (14) ◽  
pp. i408-i416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuraini Aguse ◽  
Yuanyuan Qi ◽  
Mohammed El-Kebir

Abstract Motivation Cancer phylogenies are key to studying tumorigenesis and have clinical implications. Due to the heterogeneous nature of cancer and limitations in current sequencing technology, current cancer phylogeny inference methods identify a large solution space of plausible phylogenies. To facilitate further downstream analyses, methods that accurately summarize such a set T of cancer phylogenies are imperative. However, current summary methods are limited to a single consensus tree or graph and may miss important topological features that are present in different subsets of candidate trees. Results We introduce the Multiple Consensus Tree (MCT) problem to simultaneously cluster T and infer a consensus tree for each cluster. We show that MCT is NP-hard, and present an exact algorithm based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP). In addition, we introduce a heuristic algorithm that efficiently identifies high-quality consensus trees, recovering all optimal solutions identified by the MILP in simulated data at a fraction of the time. We demonstrate the applicability of our methods on both simulated and real data, showing that our approach selects the number of clusters depending on the complexity of the solution space T. Availability and implementation https://github.com/elkebir-group/MCT. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (16) ◽  
pp. 2050255
Author(s):  
Heng Li ◽  
Yaoqin Zhu ◽  
Meng Zhou ◽  
Yun Dong

In mobile cloud computing, the computing resources of mobile devices can be integrated to execute complicated applications, in order to tackle the problem of insufficient resources of mobile devices. Such applications are, in general, characterized as workflows. Scheduling workflow tasks on a mobile cloud system consisting of heterogeneous mobile devices is a NP-hard problem. In this paper, intelligent algorithms, e.g., particle swarm optimization (PSO) and simulated annealing (SA), are widely used to solve this problem. However, both PSO and SA suffer from the limitation of easily being trapped into local optima. Since these methods rely on their evolutionary mechanisms to explore new solutions in solution space, the search procedure converges once getting stuck in local optima. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose two effective metaheuristic algorithms that incorporate the iterated local search (ILS) strategy into PSO and SA algorithms, respectively. In case that the intelligent algorithm converges to a local optimum, the proposed algorithms use a perturbation operator to explore new solutions and use the newly explored solutions to start a new round of evolution in the solution space. This procedure is iterated until no better solutions can be explored. Experimental results show that by incorporating the ILS strategy, our proposed algorithms outperform PSO and SA in reducing workflow makespans. In addition, the perturbation operator is beneficial for improving the effectiveness of scheduling algorithms in exploring high-quality scheduling solutions.


Information ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ai-Hua Zhou ◽  
Li-Peng Zhu ◽  
Bin Hu ◽  
Song Deng ◽  
Yan Song ◽  
...  

The traveling-salesman problem can be regarded as an NP-hard problem. To better solve the best solution, many heuristic algorithms, such as simulated annealing, ant-colony optimization, tabu search, and genetic algorithm, were used. However, these algorithms either are easy to fall into local optimization or have low or poor convergence performance. This paper proposes a new algorithm based on simulated annealing and gene-expression programming to better solve the problem. In the algorithm, we use simulated annealing to increase the diversity of the Gene Expression Programming (GEP) population and improve the ability of global search. The comparative experiments results, using six benchmark instances, show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other well-known heuristic algorithms in terms of the best solution, the worst solution, the running time of the algorithm, the rate of difference between the best solution and the known optimal solution, and the convergent speed of algorithms.


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