Application of transfer learning to overcome data imbalance and extrapolation for model predictive control: A real-life case

This paper proposes a transfer learning (TL)-based control-oriented model development framework. In particular, this study examines the transferability from virtual (source) to existing (target) buildings to overcome the data imbalance issue of the data-driven approach. The target system is a cooling system comprising two supply air fans and four condensing units. First, synthetic data rich enough to provide fundamental knowledge about the target system were generated using the EnergyPlus model. A data-driven model was subsequently developed to learn the underlying dynamics of the system. By adopting TL using an imbalanced dataset measured from the target system, the knowledge that the model learned from the virtual data was transferred to the target system of the existing building. The results showed that the transfer learning model could accurately describe the dynamic behavior of the target system and predict the supply air temperature with marginal errors (CVRMSE: 5.4%, MAE: 0.96 degree celsius). In other words, the TL from virtual to existing buildings can overcome the data imbalance issue for developing a reliable data-driven model.