“Smart buildings” integrated in “smart grids”: A key challenge for the energy transition by using physical models and optimization with a “human-in-the-loop” approach

Publication date: Available online 6 October 2017 Source:Comptes Rendus Physique Author(s): Frédéric Wurtz, Benoît Delinchant The big challenge for the 21th century is to decrease fossil energy use and to increase renewable energies in the framework of the climate constraint. The paper will show that smart buildings, connected to smart grids, can significantly contribute to this objective. Indeed, buildings are, on one side, the biggest consumers of energy in the electrical grid and could be among the greatest producers of renewable energy, especially thanks to the concept of energy positive buildings, and this by offering at the same time high flexibility in energy demand. That is why the paper focuses on methodologies using physical models and optimization for smart design and smart supervision for valorizing those buildings energy properties and contribute thus to the emergence of the concept of smart buildings (SBs) integrated in smart grids (SGs): we will give an overview of the mathematical optimization method used and of the kind of physical models we have developed over 10 years of active research in order to propose by this way a smart software dedicated to those SBs integrated in SGs. We explain also our global research strategy for improving this smart software, by a so-called “human-in-the-loop” approach, in which we consider that they there will be no “smart building” without “smart users”. This means a complex multi-disciplinary research that ...

Source: Comptes Rendus Physique - October 7, 2017 Category: Physics Source Type: research