Serafín Alonso Castro, Antonio Morán Álvarez, Daniel Pérez, M. A. Prada, J. J. Fuertes, M. Domínguez
{"title":"Virtual sensor for probabilistic estimation of the evaporation in cooling towers","authors":"Serafín Alonso Castro, Antonio Morán Álvarez, Daniel Pérez, M. A. Prada, J. J. Fuertes, M. Domínguez","doi":"10.3233/ICA-210654","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Global natural resources are affected by several causes such as climate change effects or unsustainable management strategies. Indeed, the use of water has been intensified in urban buildings because of the proliferation of HVAC (Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning) systems, for instance cooling towers, where an abundant amount of water is lost during the evaporation process. The measurement of the evaporation is challenging, so a virtual sensor could be used to tackle it, allowing to monitor and manage the water consumption in different scenarios and helping to plan efficient operation strategies which reduce the use of fresh water. In this paper, a deep generative approach is proposed for developing a virtual sensor for probabilistic estimation of the evaporation in cooling towers, given the surrounding conditions. It is based on a conditioned generative adversarial network (cGAN), whose generator includes a recurrent layer (GRU) that models the temporal information by learning from previous states and a densely connected layer that models the fluctuations of the conditions. The proposed deep generative approach is not only able to yield the estimated evaporation value but it also produces a whole probability distribution, considering any operating scenario, so it is possible to know the confidence interval in which the estimation is likely found. This deep generative approach is assessed and compared with other probabilistic state-of-the-art methods according to several metrics (CRPS, MAPE and RMSE) and using real data from a cooling tower located at a hospital building. The results obtained show that, to the best of our knowledge, our proposal is a noteworthy method to develop a virtual sensor, taking as input the current and last samples, since it provides an accurate estimation of the evaporation with wide enough confidence intervals, contemplating potential fluctuations of the conditions.","PeriodicalId":50358,"journal":{"name":"Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering","volume":"6 1","pages":"369-381"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8000,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ICA-210654","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Global natural resources are affected by several causes such as climate change effects or unsustainable management strategies. Indeed, the use of water has been intensified in urban buildings because of the proliferation of HVAC (Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning) systems, for instance cooling towers, where an abundant amount of water is lost during the evaporation process. The measurement of the evaporation is challenging, so a virtual sensor could be used to tackle it, allowing to monitor and manage the water consumption in different scenarios and helping to plan efficient operation strategies which reduce the use of fresh water. In this paper, a deep generative approach is proposed for developing a virtual sensor for probabilistic estimation of the evaporation in cooling towers, given the surrounding conditions. It is based on a conditioned generative adversarial network (cGAN), whose generator includes a recurrent layer (GRU) that models the temporal information by learning from previous states and a densely connected layer that models the fluctuations of the conditions. The proposed deep generative approach is not only able to yield the estimated evaporation value but it also produces a whole probability distribution, considering any operating scenario, so it is possible to know the confidence interval in which the estimation is likely found. This deep generative approach is assessed and compared with other probabilistic state-of-the-art methods according to several metrics (CRPS, MAPE and RMSE) and using real data from a cooling tower located at a hospital building. The results obtained show that, to the best of our knowledge, our proposal is a noteworthy method to develop a virtual sensor, taking as input the current and last samples, since it provides an accurate estimation of the evaporation with wide enough confidence intervals, contemplating potential fluctuations of the conditions.
期刊介绍:
Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering (ICAE) was founded in 1993. "Based on the premise that interdisciplinary thinking and synergistic collaboration of disciplines can solve complex problems, open new frontiers, and lead to true innovations and breakthroughs, the cornerstone of industrial competitiveness and advancement of the society" as noted in the inaugural issue of the journal.
The focus of ICAE is the integration of leading edge and emerging computer and information technologies for innovative solution of engineering problems. The journal fosters interdisciplinary research and presents a unique forum for innovative computer-aided engineering. It also publishes novel industrial applications of CAE, thus helping to bring new computational paradigms from research labs and classrooms to reality. Areas covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) artificial intelligence, advanced signal processing, biologically inspired computing, cognitive modeling, concurrent engineering, database management, distributed computing, evolutionary computing, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, geometric modeling, intelligent and adaptive systems, internet-based technologies, knowledge discovery and engineering, machine learning, mechatronics, mobile computing, multimedia technologies, networking, neural network computing, object-oriented systems, optimization and search, parallel processing, robotics virtual reality, and visualization techniques.