Abstract
This paper proposed an optimization method for the equipment planning problem of District Heating and Cooling energy supply system (DHC), and verified the method through a simulation against a conventional design case. The DHC problem above-mentioned is to determine the optimal combination (best-mix) of heating and cooling equipment and the required units of equipment, which minimize the total cost while satisfying the heating and cooling demands simultaneously. The algorithm employed for the method is the extended dynamic programming (ExDP) already reported by the authors, which solves the DHC problem exactly and effectively by relaxing the combinatorial explosion.
Simulation result showed that the configuration of heating and cooling equipment by its solution was better than that by conventional design in view of the total cost and thermal output ratios. Furthermore it was assured that an effective analysis was done in computation due to the reduction of states size by using the ExDP algorithm. This experimental verification can lead to the practical applicability of the proposed method to the DHC problem. Consequently, an optimal DHC planning system has been developed, which helps providing better designs of heating and cooling equipment than the conventional ones.
