Investigation of the Model Structure for Low-Order Grey-Box Modelling of Residential Buildings

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a key technology to activate the building energy flexibility. A reliable control-based model should be developed for each specific building. The structure of grey-box models is usually based on the physical knowledge of the building. Firstly, it is not certain that this information will be available for all buildings, especially for small residential buildings. Secondly, developing a specific model structure for each building is most probably not affordable. Therefore, the paper investigates the dependency on the model structure to create reliable control-oriented model for the thermal mass of residential buildings. Using a test case, the performance of grey-box models based on the physical knowledge of the building are compared to grey-box models based on a generic structure taken from building standards (EN 13790 and VDI 6007) as well as black-box models where no knowledge of the building is required.