Optimization Strategy for Building Electrical Devices Considering Multi-Comfort and Economic Virtual Game Players

Excessively pursuing the comfort of the indoor environment in buildings may increase the energy consumption of operating equipment. A non-cooperative game strategy to solve the above-mentioned problem is proposed in this paper, in which multi-comfort and economic objectives are treated as equal virtual gamers. Firstly, several kinds of electrical equipment in buildings are modeled. Secondly, a visual comfort index is established by measuring the approach, followed by the construction of multi-dimensional comfort expression, including thermal, water, and air quality in indoor environments. Then, based on game theory, the non-cooperative game model of a single entity is built by using economic and multi-comfort objectives as virtual players to avoid subjectivity in multi-objective optimization. To ensure the existence of a Nash equilibrium, the Nikaido–Isoda function is employed to reformulate the payoff function, with strategy spaces allocated based on power differences. Finally, the optimization strategy is solved by using a particle swarm optimization algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed solution increased comfort by 31.45% and reduced economic costs by 3.89% in comparison to the multi-objective optimization algorithm.