The Smart Buildings Control Suite: A Diverse Open Source Benchmark to Evaluate and Scale HVAC Control Policies for Sustainability

Commercial buildings account for 17% of U.S. carbon emissions, with roughly half of that from Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC). HVAC devices form a complex thermodynamic system, and while model predictive control and reinforcement learning have been used to optimize control policies, scaling to thousands of buildings remains a significant unsolved challenge. Most current approaches are over-optimized for specific buildings and rely on proprietary data or hard-to-configure simulators. We present the Smart Buildings Control Suite, the first open source interactive HVAC control benchmark with a focus on solutions that generalize across building. It has 3 components: real-world data from 11 buildings over 6 years, a lightweight data-driven simulator for each building, and a modular Physically Informed Neural Network (PINN) building model as a simulator alternative. The buildings span multiple climates, management systems, and sizes, and both the simulator and PINN easily transfer to new buildings, ensuring solutions using this benchmark are robust to these factors and only reliant on fully scalable building models. This represents a major step towards scaling HVAC optimization from the lab to buildings everywhere. To facilitate use, our benchmark is compatible with the Gym standard, and our data is part of TensorFlow Datasets.