Quantitative analysis of information interaction in building energy systems based on mutual information

The energy performance of building energy systems usually deviates from expectations, largely due to the differences in information interactions between supply and demand. In this study, mutual information (MI) was used as a tool to quantitatively analyze energy consumption fluctuations due to information interaction differences. First, a building energy system to cool an office building was constructed as a planning model. Meanwhile, three control strategies were developed to control the heat pump and the room temperature. Subsequently, uniform distribution error was used to simulate information interaction deviation during the control phase. Finally, the robustness of the three control strategies was quantified using MI. When MI reached 88.6% of the design phase, the energy consumption and renewable energy usage of the second control strategy were closest to the design phase. Moreover, out of 100 simulation sets with added errors, the second strategy exhibited 10% greater acceptable simulation sets than the other two strategies. The proposed analysis method can effectively identify the best strategy to reduce information differences.