Event-based optimization for multi-room HVAC system

Due to the increasing energy consumptions in buildings, building energy saving has become an important area in recent years. The policy space increases exponentially with respect to the number of rooms in the building, and could be extremely large for practical system. By focusing on policies that take actions only when certain events occur, we formulate the fan coil unit control problem as an event-based optimization, and apply derivative-based local search to approximately solve the problem. Numerical results shows that the event-based optimization (EBO) approach can converge to a local optimum policy.