Scalable Physics-Informed Neural Differential Equations and Data-Driven Algorithms for HVAC Systems
For engineers designing and controlling large HVAC systems, this work offers a fast and accurate simulation alternative to traditional high-fidelity models.
The paper presents a scalable data-driven simulation framework for large-scale HVAC systems, combining physics-informed neural ODEs with DAE solvers. It achieves multi-fold speedups over high-fidelity simulation while maintaining MAPE below a few percent for systems with up to 32 compressor-condenser pairs.
We present a scalable, data-driven simulation framework for large-scale heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that couples physics-informed neural ordinary differential equations (PINODEs) with differential-algebraic equation (DAE) solvers. At the component level, we learn heat-exchanger dynamics using an implicit PINODE formulation that predicts conserved quantities (refrigerant mass $M_r$ and internal energy $E_\text{hx}$) as outputs, enabling physics-informed training via automatic differentiation of mass/energy balances. Stable long-horizon prediction is achieved through gradient-stabilized latent evolution with gated architectures and layer normalization. At the system level, we integrate learned components with DAE solvers (IDA and DASSL) that explicitly enforce junction constraints (pressure equilibrium and mass-flow consistency), and we use Bayesian optimization to tune solver parameters for accuracy--efficiency trade-offs. To reduce residual system-level bias, we introduce a lightweight corrector network trained on short trajectory segments. Across dual-compressor and scaled network studies, the proposed approach attains multi-fold speedups over high-fidelity simulation while keeping errors low (MAPE below a few percent) and scales to systems with up to 32 compressor--condenser pairs.