Minimizing Power Consumption of an Experimental HVAC System Based on Parallel Grid Searching

Abstract

This paper proposes a parallel grid search algorithm to find an optimal operating point for minimizing the power consumption of an experimental heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) system. First, a multidimensional, nonlinear and non-convex optimization problem subject to constraints is formulated based on a semi-physical model of the experimental HVAC system. Second, the optimization problem is parallelized based on Graphics Processing Units to simultaneously compute optimization loss functions for different solutions in a searching grid, and to find the optimal solution as the one having the minimum loss function. The proposed algorithm has an advantage that the optimal solution is known with evidence as to the best one subject to current resolutions of the searching grid. Experimental studies are provided to support the proposed algorithm.