Optimal chiller loading including transients

Scheduling and loading of chillers in a multi-chiller plant is considered. A new framework is introduced considering an extended set of independent variables for the optimization problem of energy consump-tion. In this way the number of decision variables is increased, providing extra degrees of freedom to opti-mize cooling plant operation. The dynamic effects due to transients arising from switching on and off of units are usually not considered in the literature dealing with Optimal Chiller Loading/Sequencing which is restricted to the static case. In this paper, these effects are treated in a way that results in a manageable optimization problem. A Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation solution is deployed for the problem and the proposed method is compared with a similar but static approach showing the ben-efits in terms of reduced energy consumption. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.