It is envisioned that other than the grid-building communication, the smart buildings could potentially treat connected neighborhood buildings as a local buffer thus forming a local area energy network through the smart grid. As the hardware technology is in place, what is needed is an intelligent algorithm that coordinates a cluster of buildings to obtain Pareto decisions on short time scale operations. Research has proposed a memetic algorithm (MA) based framework for building cluster operation decisions and it demonstrated the framework is capable of deriving the Pareto solutions on an 8-h operation horizon and reducing overall energy costs. While successful, the memetic algorithm is computational expensive which limits its application to building operation decisions on an hourly time scale. To address this challenge, we propose a particle swarm framework, termed augmented multi-objective particle swarm optimization (AMOPSO). The performance of the proposed AMOPSO in terms of solution quality and convergence speed is improved via the fusion of multiple search methods. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare the proposed AMOPSO with nine multi-objective PSO algorithms (MOPSOs) and multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) collected from the literature. Results demonstrate that AMOPSO outperforms the nine state-of-the-art MOPSOs and MOEAs in terms of epsilon, spread, and hypervolume indicator. A building cluster case is then studied to show that the AMOPSO based decision framework is able to make hourly based operation decisions which could significantly improve energy efficiency and achieve more energy cost savings for the smart buildings. 
An augmented multi-objective particle swarm optimizer for building cluster operation decisions