A grey-box model of next-day building thermal load prediction for energy-efficient control

Abstract

Accurate building thermal load prediction is essential to many building energy control strategies. To get reliable prediction of the hourly building load of the next day, air temperature/relative humidity and solar radiation prediction modules are integrated with a grey‐box model. The regressive solar radiation module predicts the solar radiation using the forecasted cloud amount, sky condition and extreme temperatures from on‐line weather stations, while the forecasted sky condition is used to correct the cloud amount forecast. The temperature/relative humidity prediction module uses a dynamic grey model (GM), which is specialized in the grey system with incomplete information. Both weather prediction modules are integrated into a building thermal load model for the on‐line prediction of the building thermal load in the next day. The validation of both weather prediction modules and the on‐line building thermal load prediction model are presented. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.