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Energy flexibility, through short-term demand-side management (DSM) and energy storage technologies, is now seen as a major key to balancing the fluctuating supply in different energy grids with the energy demand of buildings. This is especially important when considering the intermittent nature of ever-growing renewable energy production, as well as the increasing dynamics of electricity demand in buildings. This paper provides a holistic review of (1) data-driven energy flexibility key performance indicators (KPIs) for buildings in the operational phase and (2) open datasets that can be used for testing energy flexibility KPIs. The review identifies a total of 48 data-driven energy flexibility KPIs from 87 recent and relevant publications. These KPIs were categorized and analyzed according to their type, complexity, scope, key stakeholders, data requirement, baseline requirement, resolution, and popularity. Moreover, 330 building datasets were collected and evaluated. Of those, 16 were deemed adequate to feature building performing demand response or building-to-grid (B2G) services. The DSM strategy, building scope, grid type, control strategy, needed data features, and usability of these selected 16 datasets were analyzed. This review reveals future opportunities to address limitations in the existing literature: (1) developing new data-driven methodologies to specifically evaluate different energy flexibility strategies and B2G services of existing buildings; (2) developing baseline-free KPIs that could be calculated from easily accessible building sensors and meter data; (3) devoting non-engineering efforts to promote building energy flexibility, standardizing data-driven energy flexibility quantification and verification processes; and (4) curating and analyzing datasets with proper description for energy flexibility assessm.

The increasing penetration of renewable energy sources has the potential to contribute towards the decarbonisation of the building energy sector. However, this transition brings its own challenges including that of energy integration and potential grid instability issues arising due the stochastic nature of variable renewable energy sources. One potential approach to address these issues is demand side management, which is increasingly seen as a promising solution to improve grid stability. This is achieved by exploiting demand flexibility and shifting peak demand towards periods of peak renewable energy generation. However, the energy flexibility of a single building needs to be coordinated with other buildings to be used in a flexibility market. In this context, multi-agent systems represent a promising tool for improving the energy management of buildings at the district and grid scale. The present research formulates the energy management of four buildings equipped with thermal energy storage and PV systems as a multi-agent problem. Two multi-agent reinforcement learning methods are explored: a centralised (coordinated) controller and a decentralised (cooperative) controller, which are benchmarked against a rule-based controller. The two controllers were tested for three different climates, outperforming the rule-based controller by 3% and 7% respectively for cost, and 10% and 14% respectively for peak demand. The study shows that the multi-agent cooperative approach may be more suitable for districts with heterogeneous objectives within the individual buildings. • Two DRL architectures for buildings energy management are compared to a RBC. • Daily and seasonal KPIs are used to assess controllers stability and adaptability. • DRL controllers optimise district load reducing peaks and increasing self-consumption. • Cooperative DRL architecture performs better with heterogeneous energy systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing supply and demand in the electricity grid is becoming more challenging due to the increasing penetration of variable renewable energy sources. As significant end-use consumers, and through better grid integration, buildings are expected to play an expanding role in the future smart grid. Predictive control allows buildings to better harness available energy flexibility from the building passive thermal mass. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of the building stock, developing computationally tractable control-oriented models, which adequately represent the complex and nonlinear thermal-dynamics of individual buildings, is proving to be a major hurdle. Data-driven predictive control, coupled with the "Internet of Things", holds the promise for a scalable and transferrable approach, with data-driven models replacing traditional physics-based models. This review examines recent work utilising data-driven predictive control for demand side management application with a special focus on the nexus of model development and control integration, which to date, previous reviews have not addressed. Further topics examined include the practical requirements for harnessing passive thermal mass and the issue of feature selection. Current research gaps are outlined and future research pathways are suggested to identify the most promising data-driven predictive control techniques for grid integration of buildings. • A review of 115 data-driven predictive control studies in building energy management. • Growing trend of research on data-driven predictive control in recent years. • High level of simplification in modelling seen, mostly applied to single buildings. • Gaps identified were feature selection, benchmarking, data quality and scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]