A Scenario-Based Branch-and-Bound Approach for MES Scheduling in Urban Buildings

This article presents a novel solution technique for scheduling multi-energy system (MES) in a commercial urban building to perform price-based demand response and reduce energy costs. The MES scheduling problem is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP), a nonconvex NP-hard problem with uncertainties due to renewable generation and demand. A model predictive control approach is used to handle the uncertainties and price variations. This in-turn requires solving a time-coupled multitime step MINLP during each time-epoch, which is computationally intensive. This investigation proposes an approach called the scenario-based branch-and-bound (SB3), a light-weight solver to reduce the computational complexity. It combines the simplicity of convex programs with the ability of meta-heuristic techniques to handle complex nonlinear problems. The performance of the SB3 solver is validated in the Cleantech building, Singapore and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm reduces energy cost by about 17.26% and 22.46% as against solving a multi-time step heuristic optimization model.