Organizations: School of Automation Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi, China · College of Automation, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China · Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Intelligent Networks and Network Security Laboratory, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
Buildings and data centers (DCs) are energy-intensive sectors, playing a critical role to achieve the low-carbon and sustainable energy transition targets. To this end, integrated energy system (IES) that incorporates diverse renewables, energy generation, conversion, and storage technologies to enable coordinated multi-energy supply have been widely investigated for both buildings and DCs. However, few works consider the two sectors jointly within IES to exploit their substantial synergistic benefits. Meanwhile, the operational optimization of IES remains challenging due to the difficulty to predict the multi-energy demand and supply accurately. To address these gaps, this paper investigates IES for coordinated multi-energy supply of buildings and DC, where the waste heat from DCs is recovered and reused to enhance energy efficiency. Moreover, an end-to-end learning-based method is proposed for the operational optimization of IES under uncertainty. Unlike conventional predict-then-optimize approaches, the proposed method integrates the training of prediction models for uncertain variables with the constrained optimization of IES into a unified learning framework, guiding the training of prediction models to improve operational performance, rather than prediction accuracy, thereby mitigating the impacts of predictions errors. Case studies based on real-world datasets show that the proposed methods improves the operational performance of IES by about 7-9% compared to existing predict-then-optimize methods. In addition, coordinating buildings and DCs within IES shows substantial economic benefits. In particular, the waste heat recovery from DCs leads to approximately 10% of total energy cost reduction of the IES.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : hydrogen-based IES for buildings and DCs
Fig. 2 : End-to-end learning-based method for IES
Cases
Methods
Prediction
Operation
MAPE
RMSE
R2
Regression loss [kW]
Total cost [$]
Redu. [%]
Case 1
Optimal
–
–
–
–
0
–
Decoupled
0.307
0.089
0.916
3.40
54.76
–
End-to-End
0.306
0.088
0.916
3.25
49.94
8.8
Case 2
Optimal
–
–
–
–
1510.00
–
Decoupled
0.307
0.089
0.916
16.98
2191.67
–
TABLE I : Prediction and operation performance of IES under different methods.
Fig. 3 : Predictions of uncertain variables with the Decoupled and End-to-End methods for Case 3
Fig. 4 : Evolution of energy storage devices with End-to-End method in response to dynamic electricity prices for Case 3
DC workload [%]
Total cost w/o WHR [$]
Total cost with WHR [$]
Reduction [%]
20
2647.11
2628.01
0.7
40
3435.88
3323.71
3.3
60
4529.40
4109.27
9.3
80
5534.78
4934.78
10.8
100
6594.32
5732.46
13.1
TABLE II : Economic benefits of waste heat recovery (WHR) of DCs on the IES.
This study proposes a scalable Digital Twin framework for energy optimization in data centers.The framework integrates IoT-based data acquisition, cloud computing, and machine learning techniques to enable real-time monitoring, forecasting, and intelligent energy management. A controlled small-scale data center environment was developed to monitor variables such as power consumption, temperature, and computational workload. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models were employed to predict energy demand and support operational decision-making. Experimental results demonstrated improvements in energy efficiency, including reductions in power consumption and enhancements in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). Despite being evaluated in a constrained environment, the proposed framework demonstrates strong potential as a scalable and cost-effective solution for sustainable data center management.
Raphael Hendrigo de Souza Gonçalves, Wendel Marcos dos Santos
Federal University of São João del-Rei (UFSJ) · Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of São Paulo (IFSP)
Eco-friendly energy management for artificial intelligence data centers (AIDCs) is crucial because of the significant increase in energy consumption-induced carbon emissions from AIDCs resulting from the rapid expansion of AI applications. This paper proposes a hierarchical carbon-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning (CA-MARL) framework for robust and efficient operations of AIDCs under uncertainties while ensuring low-carbon operation of power distribution systems. The framework comprises a workload manager (WM) agent and multiple local AIDC agents trained using a multi-agent transformer method, corresponding to a global AIDC aggregator and a local AIDC operator, respectively. Leveraging AIDC operation data along with nodal carbon intensity (NCI) calculated from the carbon emission flow-integrated distribution system operator problem, the WM agent spatially allocates AI training and inference jobs among all AIDCs. Based on the jobs allocated from the WM agent and NCI information, each AIDC agent schedules economical and eco-friendly operations of the AIDC by performing the following tasks: i) temporal shifting of training jobs, ii) spatial allocation of training graphics processing unit (GPU) blocks and inference GPUs within the AIDC, and iii) control of the supply air temperature of the cooling system. The effectiveness of the proposed framework was assessed using an IEEE 33-node power distribution system.
Hyunsoo Lee, Panggah Prabawa, Dae-Hyun Choi +1
LG Electronics, 17709, Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea · School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 06974, Republic of Korea · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Korea University, Seoul 02841, Republic of Korea
Data centers are increasingly optimized by artificial intelligence and, at the same time, increasingly loaded by it. The literature treats these as two unrelated problems: control studies model workload as an exogenous arrival process, while sustainability studies model infrastructure as a fixed multiplier. We screen roughly 194 papers retrieved through a documented protocol, code 63 of them, and report what the coding shows. Of 28 primary control-oriented studies, 18 are validated in simulation alone and 5 reach physical hardware or a production facility; none account for water withdrawal, and none account for embodied carbon. Reported savings intervals across four technique families overlap almost completely, which means the field cannot presently rank its own methods. Ten recurring gaps are scored for consequence and tractability, and we set out CLEAR-DC, a framework coupling a control-policy branch to a workload-demand branch through an explicit elasticity term, reads out net rather than direct benefit, and emits a schema-conformant record covering energy, carbon, water, embodied share and validation venue. The framework is an architectural and methodological proposal, not a trained system; the contribution we defend empirically is the corpus analysis and the reporting schema derived from it. Coding sheet, derived statistics and all result artifacts: https://github.com/Kimalice/AI-for-Energy-Optimization-in-Data-Centers-Closing-the-Optimizer-Load-Loop
Mohammed Basharath Ullah, Summaiya Unnisa Begum, Mohammed Nadeem Ullah