Energy and Buildings 34 (2002) 103109

Global optimization of absorption chiller system by genetic

algorithm and neural network
T.T. Chowa,*, G.Q. Zhangb, Z. Lina, C.L. Songa
a

Division of Building Science & Technology, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong
b
Department of Environmental Engineering, Hunan University, Hunan, China
Accepted 2 June 2001

Abstract
The optimal use of fuel and electricity in a direct-red absorption chiller system is important in achieving economical operation. Previous
work on the control schemes mainly focused on the component local feedback control. A system-based control approach, which allows an
overall consideration of the interactive nature of the plant, the building and their associated variables is seen to be the right direction. This
paper introduces a new concept of integrating neural network (NN) and genetic algorithm (GA) in the optimal control of absorption chiller
system. Based on a commercial absorption unit, neural network was used to model the system characteristics and genetic algorithm as a
global optimization tool. The results appear promising. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Absorption chiller; System optimal control; Articial neural network; Genetic algorithm

1. Introduction
The advantages of using absorption chiller system are the
reduced use of CFC refrigerants, and the eliminated concerns about lubricants in refrigerants [1]. It also contributes
to the reduction of electricity demand during peak cooling
seasons by shifting to gas or oil. In China, 70% of the central
air conditioning units are run by electricity, the rest 30% are
by fuel or steam [2]. A LiBr absorption chiller uses water as
the refrigerant and lithium bromide as the absorbent. The
machine is commonly used in air conditioning of buildings.
The absorption cycle and vapor compression cycle have in
common the evaporation and condensation of a refrigerant
liquid; these processes occur at two pressure levels within
the unit. The two cycles differ in that the absorption cycle
uses a pump and a heat-operated generator to produce the
pressure differential, whereas the mechanical compression
cycle uses a compressor [3].
A direct-red LiBr absorption chiller system is shown in
Fig. 1. The system uses gas or oil to supply the need of
cooling capacity, but requires the provision of electric power
to operate the chilled and cooling water pumps, LiBr solution circulating pumps. Variable speed pumps can be used.
Heat rejected from the condenser is carried away by the
cooling water loop, and released to the ambient via a cooling
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: 852-2788-7622; fax: 852-2788-9716.
E-mail address: bsttchow@cityu.edu.hk (T.T. Chow).

tower (evaporative cooling), a radiator (air-cooled), or a

plate-type heat exchanger (seawater cooled). The use of airand seawater-cooled devices has been common in Hong
Kong since for years the government discouraged the use of
evaporative cooling, other than for industrial applications,
for the reason of scarcity in water resource. One drawback of
direct-red LiBr absorption chiller lies in its excessive fuel
consumption [4]. It requires more cooling water ow, and
hence higher-capacity circulating pump. This also increases
the size of the cooling tower (or the heat exchanger) and the
associated mechanical devices. The application of absorption chillers in Hong Kong has been far behind than vapor
compression chillers. The picture may be improved after the
revised government policy in favor of district cooling (hence
the possibility of tri-generation) [5] and the possibility of
installing territory wide natural gas pipelines.
2. Optimal control of chiller systems
The best solution for determining the optimal control for a
given system is to have a detailed model of the complete
process that operates in parallel with the actual system. An
optimization algorithm is then applied to this model in order
to determine the optimal control. At any given time, it is
possible for the chiller system to meet the cooling load
demand using different modes of operations and set points.
Good control strategy is an effective way to improve the

0378-7788/02/$ see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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T.T. Chow et al. / Energy and Buildings 34 (2002) 103109

Nomenclature
Ce
Cf
COP
m
M
MSE
Paux
Pc
Pchiller
Pcool
Pm
Qc
Qf
r
R
T

unit electricity cost (US$/kWh)

unit fuel cost (US$/kg)
coefficient of performance
mass flow rate (kg/s)
maximum number of generation
mean square error
auxiliary electric power (kW)
probability of crossover
chilled water pump electric power (kW)
cooling water pump electric power (kW)
probability of mutate
cooling load (kW)
fuel consumption rate (kg/h)
random number
correlation coefficient
temperature (8C)

Greek letter
F
total energy cost rate (US$/h)
performance of the chiller systems and the associated equipment. Optimal supervisory control refers to the determination of the control rule of a cooling plant to aim at
minimizing the total operating cost. Many optimization
control studies related to central cooling plant have been
reported, for instance Johnson [6], Spethmann [7], Cumali
[8], Braun et al. [9,10], Braun [11], Meyer and Emery [12],
King and Potter [13]. These studies primarily demonstrated
the potential savings with the use of optimal control. The
direct-red absorption chiller, however, is a complicated
nonlinear system and a relatively new technology. In the
past, the research on its optimization was focused mainly at
the component (or the sub-system) level, of which the
analyses encountered complex thermodynamic phenomena
and relied on a series of simplifying assumptions. Very little
information about the global optimization of the complete
system had been reported in literature. Koeppel et al. [14]

rst used global optimal algorithm (simulated annealing) to

develop optimal supervision control guidelines compared to
other control strategies.
A system-based control approach, in contrast to individual component control (e.g. in local feedback control),
takes into account the interactive nature of the plant components, the building system, and their associated variables.
When implemented with an optimal control scheme, the
system approach can utilize the knowledge of the interactions in the system to minimize a cost function. Control
based on localized feedback has less capability and exibility to minimize the same cost function, because this
knowledge is not provided to the controller. Numerous
studies have shown that system-based optimal control strategies lead to improved system responses and reduced
energy use compared to traditional control strategy, and
that further improvements are possible when multiple control variables are optimized simultaneously.
The use of articial neural networks (ANN) is proliferating with remarkable speed in simulation. In HVAC, the
research of ANN has stressed on the importance of selflearning in process control global optimal control [15],
predicting the energy use in complex system without the
need for a data-acquisition system [16] and energy management [17].
On the other hand, genetic algorithms (GA) belong to a
class of probabilistic search methods that strike a remarkable
balance between exploration and exploitation of the search
space. They are very different from random algorithms, as
they combine elements of directed and stochastic search
methods. They have been successfully applied to optimization problems, like wire routing, adaptive control, cognitive
modeling, optimal control problems, transportation problems, etc. In HVAC-related eld, the research work of
Lam [18] had been reported.
The GA and ANN are found especially appropriate to
tackle the absorption chiller system control problems. Their
advantages can be made full use of, i.e. the ability of ANN to
learn complex nonlinear mapping, and that of GA to nd the
global optimum in a bounded parametric search space.

Fig. 1. Flow diagram of an absorption chiller system.

T.T. Chow et al. / Energy and Buildings 34 (2002) 103109

3. Integration of GA and ANN

3.1. The optimization plan
Fig. 2 gives a brief outline of the optimization plan. The
process begins with the identication of the system input
variables and their constraints. The system input variables
are composed of control variables and uncontrolled variables. The control variables are the targets (like pump
speeds, chilled/cooling water temperature settings, etc.) that
the system is to respond for achieving a tness function (like
minimized energy consumption, operating costs, etc.).
Uncontrolled variables are those measurable quantities (like
instantaneous cooling load, ambient temperature, etc.) that

105

may not be controlled by the system, but instead may affect

the system performance. The constraints of the input variables dene the boundaries of the search space. They are to
be set based on real life operating experience and knowledge
about system and component features/characteristics.
The next step involves the development of the GA population of the input variables for use in the probabilistic-based
optimum search. This is followed by the prediction of the
system outputs based on an ANN model of the system. For
a chiller system, the tness function usually addresses
energy consumption, or is simply a cost function. Once
the outputs are available through the ANN computation, the
relevant outputs are passed to the cost function routine to
determine the latest values and compared. While the tness

Fig. 2. Optimization process based on GA and ANN.

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T.T. Chow et al. / Energy and Buildings 34 (2002) 103109

requirements are being updated from time to time, a new

generation of the population will be produced (the details
will be explained later) and gone through the same evaluation process. This process continues until the maximum
number of generations has been reached. The nal population of the generation groups is designated the ``winner'' and
rewarded the nal generation of lowest cost (nal tness).
3.2. Cost function
The energy cost in the absorption chiller system is attributable to the use of fuel and electricity. The system variable
to be minimized can be the total energy cost rate, as
determined by the cost function F in that
F Cf Qf Ce Pchiller Pcool Paux

(1)

where F is the total energy cost rate (US$/h), Cf the unit fuel
cost (US$/kg), Ce the unit electricity cost (US$/kWh), Qf the
fuel consumption rate (kg/h), Pchiller the chilled water pump
electric power (kW), Pcool the cooling water pump electric
power (kW), and Paux the auxiliary electric power (kW).
Included in Paux are the electric power consumed in all other
auxiliary devices, such as the solution pumps, the cooling
tower/radiator fans or the seawater pumps, etc. In our study,
Paux was less than 1% of the total power consumption, and
hence had negligible contribution to the cost function.
4. A case study
A chiller system with the use of a 989 kW direct-red
double-effect LiBr absorption chiller was studied. The nominal system parameters are listed in Table 1. The study was to
determine under different cooling load (Qc) operation, the
best combination of the chilled and cooling water mass ow
rates (m2, m3), the chilled water supply temperature (T2), and
the cooling water return temperature (T3) that could minimize
the system energy cost as dened by the cost function (F).
Hence, in the system model, there were ve inputs
which included the four control variables (m2, m3, T2, T3)
and one uncontrolled variables (Qc). The outputs were the
three variables (Qf, Pchiller, Pcool) in Eq. (1), plus in addition
the chiller COP. COP is a good indicator of the plant
efciency, and can be used for comparing the performance
of individual cases with the standard design case.
Table 1
Standard design data of the absorption chiller
Variable

Value

Cooling water leaving/return temperature (8C)

Chilled water supply/return temperature (8C)
Cooling water pump flow rate (m3/h)
Chilled water pump flow rate (m3/h)
Chiller cooling capacity (kW)
Maximum fuel rate (kg/h)
COP

32/37.5
7/12
272
170
989
67.2
1.220

The operation of an absorption chiller system has to be

limited to certain ranges of operating parameters to guard
against solution crystallization and evaporator freezing problems. In the given situation, the operating ranges of the
chilled and cooling water temperatures and ow rates were,
respectively:
1. chilled water:
5 C  T2  11:5 C

(2)

50%  m2  120%

(3)

2. cooling water:
14 C  T3  38 C

(4)

30%  m3  120%

(5)

These formed a part of the system input constraints in the

optimum search. In actual practice however, the chiller
seldom runs with cooling water return temperature
approaching the lower limit of 148C.
4.1. ANN system representation
Adequate training of an ANN system model requires
rstly a good representation of the available test data. Hence,
eld measurements were taken for a wide range of cooling
loads that varied from 30 to 120%. In the current study, 2100
sets of test data were nally used through a mix of eldmeasured and catalog-deduced data. The training was executed systematically with different number of layers and
also different number of nodes in each hidden layer. All
these models were based on the multilayer perceptron
architecture [19]. Tan-sigmoid transfer function was
used as the activation function for the hidden layers, and
linear transfer function was used for the output layer. The
values of the test data were normalized to within the range
from 1 to 1.
The training was a supervisory learning process with
crossvalidation [20]. The LevenbergMarquardt (LM) algorithm was repeatedly applied until the evaluation standard
was reached. It was found that not all ANN congurations
would produce converged results. Among the 28 converged
cases, which include both single and two hidden layers, the
conguration 5-5-9-4 appeared to be the most optimal
topology [21]. The conguration is shown in Fig. 3. The
drops in mean square error (MSE) with epoch during the
training and validation processes are shown in Fig. 4. It can
be seen that the two curves are very close. In these processes,
the auto-stop function was imposed and satisfactory results
were obtained in around 450 epochs for both cases. The nal
results of the simulation, including the MSE and the correlation coefcients R of individual output variables are listed
in Table 2. The values of R are less than 8% for the four
output variables. MSE is at 0.00285. This is much better than
those of the single-hidden-layer congurations, where MSE
values were above 0.01.

T.T. Chow et al. / Energy and Buildings 34 (2002) 103109

Fig. 3. ANN model of the adsorption chiller system.

Fig. 4. ANN training results based on 5-5-9-4 configuration.

4.2. Global searching by genetic algorithm

In this absorption system, the outputs of the GA optimization should be the optimal set of control variables (m2, m3,
T2, T3) to minimize F at a specic value of the uncontrolled
variable Qc. The ow chart in Fig. 2 outlines the key features
of the GA evolution program in use. Generally speaking, the
program worked with the following four main steps.
1. Step 1: To initialize a population, the size of populations
was 50, which is a trade-off between an efficient
searching process and the avoidance of pre-mature
convergence. The initial population was chosen randomly within the assigned input constraints, i.e. m2 from
85 m3/h (50%) to 204 m3/h (120%), m3 from 81.6 m3/h
(30%) to 326.4 m3/h (120%), T2 from 5 to 11.58C, and
T3 from 14 to 388C. Binary codes were used to code the
nonbinary parameters. The number of bits in the binary
Table 2
Training results of the 5-5-9-4 ANN configuration
ANN

MSE

R(COP)
(%)

R(Qf)
(%)

R(Pcool)
(%)

R(Pchilled)
(%)

5-5-9-4

0.00285

4.94

5.64

7.91

7.24

107

string was set to 16 for each of the five input variables,

and hence came up with 80 bit chromosomes. This is
adequate judging from required precision in defining the
numerical values of each input variable. Qc was predefined in every iteration process in order to search for
the corresponding best outcome.
2. Step 2: To evaluate each chromosome by applying the
ANN model and the cost function to the decoded
sequences of the variables. The results were obtained for
the entire population. They were compared to give the
ranked fitness values.
3. Step 3: To use the three genetic operators to alter the
composition of the offspring in the next generation,
based on the pre-set probability values [22]. These
included the following.
3.1. Selection operator: Based on the ranked fitness
values, a selection of a new population was made
with respect to the probability distribution, i.e. the
RouletteWheel method.
3.2. Crossover operator: Recombination to the individuals in the new population was applied. The
probability of crossover Pc was set to 0.5 and the
single-point crossover index was randomly selected. For each pair of chromosomes in the current
population, a random number r was generated from
the range 0; . . . ; 1; if r < Pc , the given pair was
then selected for crossover.
3.3. Mutation operator: Performed on a bit-by-bit basis.
The probability of mutate Pm was set to 0.0333.
For every bit in the population, a random number r
was generated from the range 0; . . . ; 1; if r < Pm ,
the given bit was mutated independently.
The above values of Pc and Pm were determined by working
experience with the problem in hand.
4. Step 4: Cyclic repetition of the above steps 2 and 3. The
algorithm was stopped after a fixed number of iterations.
This depended on the maximum number of generations
M specified in the program. In our case, M 100.
5. Results of optimization
The following three optimal control cases were studied for
a range of cooling loads.
1. Case 1: Constant chilled and cooling water flow rates.
2. Case 2: Variable cooling water flow rate (30120%) and
constant chilled water flow rate.
3. Case 3: Variable cooling water flow rate (30120%) and
chilled water flow rate (50120%).
The results of these three optimal control cases were compared to a normalized (standard design) case. In the normalized case, the input variables were maintained at their
nominal values, i.e. m2 at 170 m3/h, m3 at 272 m3/h, T2
at 78C, and T3 at 328C. The normalized case complied
with the manufacturer chiller design conditions with pumps

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T.T. Chow et al. / Energy and Buildings 34 (2002) 103109

Fig. 5. Chiller fuel consumption rate vs. cooling load.

operating at constant-rated speeds. This was therefore

served as the benchmark.
Fig. 5 compares the fuel consumptions at different cooling
load conditions. It can be seen that over the entire range of
cooling load, the normalized case consumed most fuel
energy. The excess in fuel consumption is generally 3.2%
greater than that of case 1, 4.8% greater than that of case 2,
and 4.9% greater than that of case 3.
Fig. 6 compares the chiller COP at different cooling load
conditions. It can be seen that the system reached the highest
COP at around 490590 kW, or 5060% of the rated cooling
load. This applies to all the four cases. It was also found that
although the COP values appeared close for all four cases
under low load conditions, there were considerable improvements for the three optimal cases at loads above 50%.
Fig. 7 shows the trends of increase of the cost function
(total operating costs) with the cooling loads for the four

Fig. 6. Chiller COP vs. cooling load.

Fig. 7. Total energy cost rate vs. chiller cooling load.

T.T. Chow et al. / Energy and Buildings 34 (2002) 103109

cases. While their increasing trends are relatively the same,

the differences among the four cases become more obvious.
The normalized case is the most costly one, as expected. A
slight improvement can be found by allowing the temperature settings to vary, as in case 1. Much more savings can be
observed for cases 2 and 3, where the operation of the
variable speed pump(s) was controlled. Compared to the
normalized case, case 2 generally resulted in a saving of
14.2%, and for case 3, 19.4%.
In all these comparisons, case 3 appears to be the most
successful optimal control case. This demonstrates the
potential of achieving more energy saving when bringing
in more control variables in the optimal control strategy.
Along this line of thought, including the variable speed
component in the heat rejection device (like the cooling
tower fan or the seawater pump) as an additional control
variable is likely to achieve better saving. The work here
described also serves as an example to demonstrate the good
potential in applying ANN modeling and GA global search
technique in absorption chiller system as a complex nonlinear system.
6. Conclusions
The optimal use of fuel and electricity in a direct-red
absorption chiller system is important in achieving economical operation of the system. The recent research work favors
the use of the multivariable system-based control approach.
Both neural network (NN) and genetic algorithm are especially appropriate for investigating the complex nonlinear
control system, taking the ability of ANN to learn complex
nonlinear mapping, and that of GA to search for the global
optimum in a bounded parametric space. A concept of
integrating these two techniques has been introduced
through a worked example on an absorption chiller system
in use. An ANN system model with a 5-5-9-4 conguration
was developed. The global optimization made use of the GA
approach compared the operating costs of three optimal
cases with the standard normalized case. The results show
that considerable savings can be achieved.
Acknowledgements
This research project was nancially supported by the
City University of Hong Kong Strategic Research Grant no.
7000971.
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