Science Talks 7 (2023) 100247

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Science Talks
journal homepage: www.elsevier.es/sctalk

Addressing the control challenge of energy systems in built

environment areas
⁎
Rafael Monge Palma , Teresa Palomo Amores, MPaz Montero-Guiérrez, MCarmen Guerrero Delgado,
José Sánchez Ramos, Servando Álvarez Domínguez
Grupo Termotecnia, Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería, University of Seville, Spain

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The combination of higher air temperatures with densely urbanized areas is changing the concept of liveability in cit-
Urban space ies. With more frequent and intense heat waves, the concept of thermal comfort transcends the physical boundaries of
City livability buildings. The solution set for future sustainable urban environments must include buildings and their surrounding
Cities adaptation
areas as spaces that can provide comfortable conditions with minimum use of active energy systems. Addressing the
Conditioning system
comfort of the individual in outdoor environments is being exploited in the Cartuja QANAT. This pilot explores the
Artificial intelligence control
urban area as a unique space where buildings and surroundings act together to provide a healthy environment for in-
habitants using natural-based systems. A conference centre and an amphitheatre are used as a pilot for the testing of an
innovative set of passive cooling systems combined with renewable generation. The need to rely on the variability of
natural passive cooling sources and renewable energy creates a complex energy system control problem that has never
been adequately solved. The control solution will consist of an artificial intelligence control system for energy systems.
Where combines the strengths of Model Predictive Control and Reinforcement Learning to perform accurate predic-
tions of space conditions and energy generation and optimize energy systems.

Video to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/

j.sctalk.2023.100247.

⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rmonge1@us.es (R. Monge Palma).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sctalk.2023.100247
Received 12 March 2023; Received in revised form 13 May 2023; Accepted 26 May 2023
2772-5693/© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
R. Monge Palma et al. Science Talks 7 (2023) 100247

Figures and tables

Fig. 1. Regional changes in temperature (left) and precipitation (right) at 1.5 °C (top) and 3 °C (bottom) of global warming compared to the 1850–1900 baseline [1]. Tradi-
tional urbanistic solutions are insufficient to meet the changing environment. Adaptation to climate change requires an update of urban solutions and tools complemented
with innovative technologies [2]. The last projections of the IPCC show that the Iberian peninsula will have a warmer and drier climate.

Fig. 2. Heatwave frequency and amplitude changes for 2021–2050 and 2071–2100 relative to the 1961–1990 period, adapted from [3]. The heat waves will be more frequent
and more intense, potentializing the conversion of urban areas into inhospitable environments, especially during summer. Even more, in highly populated areas the Urban
Heat Island effect will be aggravated. Urban Heat Island effect represents the impact of urbanized areas on air temperature in comparison with the natural landscape area [4].

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Fig. 3. Observation of the urban heat island effect in Seville: comparison of registered temperature in the Seville centre and a rural location. In this figure is possible to observe
the urban heat island effect where is highlighted the poor night cooling of the Seville urban area. Besides the anthropogenic released heat and vegetation density in urban
areas, this effect relies on the heat storage capacity of exposed mass. Therefore, cooling cities will be more difficult in the future if the urban plans do not include
mitigation measures. The emergency to prepare the urban space for the future led to more than 200 cities around the world implementing effective mitigation nature-
based strategies. These strategies rely on providing passive cooling and visual comfort for users of the urban space. One example is Singapore [5] with a large project to gen-
erate solutions, tools and pilot experiences of how to cool the city. However, the connection between the open space and the building is not exploited. Yet, the projects that are
based on bioclimatic techniques in most cases have a lack in their design not being able to provide a significant benefit to outdoor comfort conditions or surroundings (as can
be buildings or the street) [6].

Fig. 4. Cartuja QANAT project overview. The Cartuja QANAT project's main goal is to recover one of the avenues of Expo 92, integrating bioclimatic conditioning strategies
and proving that public open spaces can offer a healthy and comfortable environment for inhabitants in a scenario of warmer cities and climate, while also addressing the
challenges of controlling the energy systems in the urban space. These spaces consist of a renovated amphitheatre, an open conference centre and improved green areas.
A PV power plant of 80 kWp is integrated into the conference centre roof being able to cover all the energy needs of Cartuja QANAT buildings and provide surplus production
to the neighbourhood. This project aims to possibly a fully automated, and intelligent, control of all spaces in the avenue (Amphitheatre and Conference Centre).

Fig. 5. Conference centre: inside (right) and outside view (left). The conference centre is a newly created space with a rectangular shape of 750m2, and it can be divided into
subspaces according to multiple patterns to allow simultaneous different activities. Was designed as a shelter from the heat for the visitors of the avenue and at the same time a
fully open space. The confinement of this space is ensured by a radiant ceiling, a vegetal barrier on the west façade, a vertical louvre with 45° of aperture on the east façade,
and a main floor lowered by 2 m from the avenue level. A vegetal barrier is used on the west façade due the northwest is the most frequent wind direction during summer in
Seville, and this type o barrier can provide an evaporative cooling effect.

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Fig. 6. Detail of the radiant ceiling. This figure shows the integration of a radiant-cooled ceiling developed for open spaces [7] in the Conference Center.

Fig. 7. Qanats and the air ducts. Besides the confinement guaranteed by the building envelope, being open to the outdoors will require a cooling need to ensure acceptable
thermal comfort for the occupants. Therefore, this project integrates a set of innovative cooling systems based on passive solutions such as geothermal cooling, the falling film
technology [8], an evaporative cooling system [9,10] and a reinterpreted Persian Qanat used as a cooling battery. Each qanat has 40 m of length, 3 m of width and 1.5 m of
depth with a 70m3 water storage capacity. They are thermally insulated by low-conductivity materials and vegetation pavement. The cooled air is delivered to the space on
floor level. Outdoor air conditioning has five primary stages: (1) Buried ducts: cool the air using the soil as a cooling source; (2) Evaporative cooling unit: pre-cools the air
when (1) can not reach supply air set-point temperature; (3) Submerged ducts: cool the air using the Qanat water as a cooling source; (4) Support heat exchangers: when
(1), (2) and (3) are unable to provide the right supply air temperature, the air is cooled using heat exchangers coupled to the air ducts and the Qanat water. (5) The Heat
Pump coupled to the heat exchangers is turned on when the cooling demand is very high.

Fig. 8. The evaporative aqueduct (middle) and the falling film system (left). The falling film technique cools the water through an evaporative/convective-radiant effect
where the sky and the air are the cool sources by producing a water-falling film on photovoltaic panels during nighttime [8]. On the other hand, the evaporative aqueduct
uses the evaporative effect to cool the water using more than 200 flat spray nozzles with drops of diameter less than 0.5 mm, a technique recovered from the Expo’92 expe-
rience [9,10].

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Fig. 9. General scheme of conditioning systems in the Conference Centre. This figure presents the conceptualization of our pilot project, emphasizing the complexity of the
control challenges arising from the modular nature of the energy systems. In other words, it raises the question of which system should be activated and when. Additionally, it
addresses the need to establish a relationship between the cooling systems' effectiveness and the occupants' perceived thermal comfort. These important questions are
currently unanswered, and it is crucial to address the control approach that will be implemented to tackle these challenges. The conditioning system can be divided into
two categories: space conditioning units (grey boxes), as described previously, and cooling systems (blue boxes). These last are responsible to cool the stored water in the
Qanat, which supplies all the conditioning units. Cooling the Qanat water is primarily based on the falling film technique and secondly on the evaporative aqueduct as a
natural backup solution. These two systems are responsible for each night the 140 m3 of stored water being cooled naturally from 25 °C to 19 °C. When the passive
cooling systems are unable to fulfil the cooling needs a heat pump will cool the Qanat water. The water consumed for conditioning the conference centre and the
amphitheatre is stored during the rainy season.

Fig. 10. Amphitheatre during the Expo’92 (right) and at the present (left). The Amphitheatre is a space used during the Expo 92 period as a performance kiosk). It has a
semicircular shape of approximately 28 m in diameter and can accommodate 200 people. This space was recovered and adapted to the intense Seville summer by
delivering cooled air through the front of the stage and lowering the cover surface temperature.

Fig. 11. Overview of the amphitheatre. A Dedicated Outdoor Air System (DOAS) is used to cool and deliver the conditioned air to the stage and ensure an average temperature
of 26 °C at least. The cooling unit is equipped with two heat exchangers, one connected to a lake and the second to the Qanat water. The lake cools the water using the
evaporative effect and fifty spray nozzles [10,11]. As a cooling backup, the Qanat water is available. The cover of the amphitheatre has an irrigation system to decrease
the radiant temperature of the space.

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Fig. 12. General scheme of conditioning systems in the amphitheatre. This scheme resumes all the conditioning systems that will be in use in the Amphitheatre and how are
linked to the QANAT's.

Fig. 13. Resume of data acquisition sensors/m and actuators. This resumes the type of used sensors as the controlled units. Addressing the control challenge of a conditioning
system with this complexity demands an extensive and accurate monitoring system for the decision-making process of the control agent. The monitoring system is based on a
SCADA system from Schneider as the primary agent (data acquisition and actuators control). We have a challenge that is possibly a fully automated control of all spaces in the
avenue (Amphitheatre and Conference Centre). This works intents to present a possible path to find the answer for an optimal control approach.

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Fig. 14. Workflow for addressing the control challenge: stages 1, 2 and 3. Providing comfortable environments to building occupants is a multiobjective optimisation problem
that requires cooperation between different building components, energy systems and occupants [12]. Recent reviews on methodologies for controlling occupant comfort in
buildings [12–14] indicate that optimal control of building systems can only be achieved by using automation, preferably integrating artificial intelligence. Currently, it is not
clear which control approach, MPC or Reinforcement Learning, can produce better results for this problem. It has been well demonstrated that MPC can effectively improve
the energy performance of buildings [13–19]. Still, each combination of building/energy systems and users is different being difficult to transpose MPC control strategies to
other cases [14]. RL-based control strategies have been used in buildings for real-time control, as an alternative solution to rule-based or MPC approaches [12]. Standard RL
consists of a model-free controller that identifies the optimal control actions without requiring detailed modelling of the building systems [12]. However, model-free RL re-
quires a large number of interactions with the environment to reach good performance, which is impractical for systems with a direct impact on user comfort [20,21]. There-
fore, the development of the control system will rely on four stages. The first one, currently undergoing, is the implementation and operationalisation of the monitoring and
primary control system. In the second stage, a ruled-based control will be developed and implemented to produce a database for the calibration and fine-tuning of a virtual
building model. This virtual building model will be integrated into the AI control agent.

Fig. 15. Workflow for addressing the control challenge: Stages 3 and 4. The last two stages will develop, test and integrate the hybrid RL control system. This will combine the
predictive capabilities of MPC with the adaptive optimal control policy capability of RL, to implement a user-centric control approach that incorporates user feedback in the
RL agent reward path. The hybrid RL approach will use: 1) a short-term prediction horizon (a few hours) to cope with fast system dynamics and interaction with occupants,
actuator control, outdoor climate and conditioned environment; 2) a mid-term prediction horizon (from a few hours up to one day) capable of accounting for slower dynam-
ics, interactions between outdoor climate and the building thermal storage effects, and occupancy; and 3) user satisfaction feedback. For this purpose, a combination of Deep
Neural Network (DNN), available local weather forecasts, and an occupancy schedule plan will be employed. To solve the control problem at each time step within opera-
tional and environmental constraints the DNN models will be pre-trained off-line using a combination of physical and numerical experiments: Pseudo-Random Binary Signals
(PRBS) controlling the actual building actuators to elicit and observe system dynamics; and simulation of occupancy scenarios using dynamic building thermal simulation.

CRediT authorship contribution statement Declaration of interests

Rafael Monge Palma: Investigation, Writing – original draft. Teresa
Palomo Amores: Data curation, Writing – original draft. MPaz Montero-
Guiérrez: Investigation, Writing – original draft. MCarmen Guerrero
Delgado: Validation, Conceptualization, Supervision. José Sánchez Ramos:
Validation, Conceptualization, Supervision. Servando Álvarez Domínguez:
Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Formal analysis.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial inter-
ests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the
work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This study has been funded by the projects “LIFEWATERCOOL - Water
Efficient Systemic Concept for the Climate Change Adaptation in Urban
Areas” by the European Commission (Grant Agreement LIFE18 CCA/ES/
001122) and the project “CONSTANCY - Resilient urbanisation

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methodologies and natural conditioning using imaginative nature-based
solutions and cultural heritage to recover the street life” by the Science
and Innovation Ministry of Spain (Grant Agreement PID2020-118972RB-
I00). Also, this study has been co-financed by the European Regional Devel-
opment Funds (ERDF).
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Rafael Monge Palma, completed the Integrated Master's
Degree in Energy and Environmental Engineering on July
2019 by Ciências ULisboa. Worked as Assistant Researcher at
the Ciências ULisboa on Building Energy Systems and indoor
comfort in poor houses between September 2019 and May
2021. He has also worked as an energy engineering consultant
in Portugal on various projects for the integration of local re-
newable generation and building thermal simulation.
Since January 2022 is a research member of the Energy
Engineering Department of the University of Seville, where is
studying the application of Artificial Intelligence Control to bio-
climatic conditioning systems in urban spaces.
Science Talks 7 (2023) 100247
Teresa Palomo Amores is an Assistant Professor and
Researcher at the Energy Engineering Department of the Uni-
versity of Seville since 2019. In recent years she has participated
in 3 European projects, in addition to 5 contracts/knowledge
transfer projects for privity entities. It has a total of 6 JCR publi-
cations in scientific journals and more than 30 contributions to
national and international congresses related to research and
teaching.
MPaz Montero-Guiérrez is an Industrial Engineer from the
University of Cadiz since 2021. She has work experience in
aerothermal, air conditioning and ventilation projects, as well
as in energy certification of buildings thanks to her work as a
Project Engineer. During 2021 she has been a lecturer in Engi-
neering Projects. Since January 2022 she belongs to the Energy
Engineering Department of the University of Seville where has
participated in several international and national projects and
congresses. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis,
specialising in the field of urban climate and outdoor comfort,
its impact on buildings, and natural conditioning and mitigating
techniques.
MCarmen Guerrero Delgado is a research member of the En-
ergy Engineering Department of the University of Seville since
2013, and an Assistant Professor since 2020. Her research activ-
ity has generated 22 contributions in international journals
indexed in categories of his area of knowledge of the JCR of
the ISI: 14 of them are in first-quartile journals (Q1) and 7 in
second-quartile journals (Q2). She is also the author of 24 pub-
lications at international and national congresses.
Since 2013 she has participated in 7 research projects in
public and competitive calls. In addition, she has participated
in 20 contracts/knowledge transfer projects for privity entities.
José Sánchez Ramos, is a Lecturer Professor at the Department
of Energy Engineering of the University of Seville. Since 2007,
his main line of activity has always been related to the thermal
performance of buildings and Natural Cooling Techniques.
He has been a collaborator in the transposing process of the
Energy Performance Building Directives (2007 and 2016) to the
building energy normative in Spain. Examples of the main pro-
jects are: Integration of Downdraught Evaporative Cooling in
Buildings (three projects financed by the EU); Ventilation tech-
nologies, Infiltrations and their impact on Energy Needs (two
projects) and Natural Cooling Techniques applied to buildings
(two projects); he is co-author of 4 books and chapter, 41 arti-
cles in international journals included in the JCR and 68 confer-
ence communications.
Servando Álvarez Domínguez is a full professor at the Depart-
ment of Energy Engineering of the University of Seville and
Head of the Grupo de Termotecnia. Since 1979 he is involved
in research activities dealing with energy in buildings with an
emphasis on passive heating and cooling of buildings in the
Mediterranean climate and Natural Cooling Techniques.
From 1988 to 1992 he was the lead researcher of climate
control of the outdoor spaces of the Universal Exposition of Se-
ville of 1992 (EXPO’92). These activities were rewarded with
the Mouchot prize in 1993. In the last 15 years, he has been re-
sponsible for all of the scientific works related to the transposi-
tion of Energy Performance Building Directives (2002 and
2010) to the building energy normative in Spain.
He is the main author or co-author of 12 technical books, he
has published 25 papers in national and international journals such as Solar Energy or Energy
and Buildings and more than 50 papers in international congresses.