Publications by Luc Girardin | EPFL Graph Search

A trustworthy reinforcement learning framework for autonomous control of a large-scale complex heating system: Simulation and field implementation

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Amirreza Heidari

Traditional control approaches heavily rely on hard-coded expert knowledge, complicating the development of optimal control solutions as system complexity increases. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a selflearning control solution, proving advantag ...

Elsevier BV2025

Decomposition method to evaluate district heating/cooling network potential at urban scale

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Raphaël Briguet, Ana Catarina Gouveia Braz, Bingqian Liu

In this work, a tool to design district heating networks (DHN) is presented and applied to the city of Lausanne as a case study. The evaluation of the buildings’ heat/cooling demand is performed using a Geographic Information System (GIS) database, built f ...

Associazione Italiana Di Ingegneria Chimica2024

AIDRES: A database for the decarbonisation of the heavy industry in Europe

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Ivan Daniel Kantor, Shivom Sharma, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Rafael Amorim Leandro De Castro Amoedo, Julia Granacher, Yi Zhao, Meire Ellen Gorete Ribeiro Domingos

The AIDRES database aims to support the long-term objective of a fully integrated industrial strategy in the EU 27, providing a service to the European Commission and a catalogue for industries to understand the effectiveness, efficiency and cost of potent ...

Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria2023

AIDRES Final Report, Methodology and results for EU industrial production routes in 2030 and 2050 (D3.1), Supporting document to the EU industrial plants database

Luc Girardin

The objective of the AIDRES database is to support the EU-27's long-term goal of achieving a fully integrated industrial strategy. It serves as a valuable resource for the European Commission and industries, offering insights into the effectiveness, effici ...

European Commission, Directorate-General for Energy2023

Data reduction for mixed integer linear programming in complex energy systems

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Luise Middelhauve, Natalija Ljubic, Julia Granacher

The task of optimally designing and scheduling energy systems with a high share of renewable energies is complex and computationally demanding. A widespread method for tackling this task is to apply mixed integer linear programming (MILP). Even though the ...

2021

How Smart is the Grid?

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Ermanno Lo Cascio, Zhichuan Ma

Ancient Romans called urbs the set of buildings and infrastructures, and civitas the Roman citizens. Today instead, while the society is surfing the digital tsunami, urbs and civitas tend to become much closer, almost merging, that we might attempt to cond ...

2021

SCCER JA-RED - Report on the performance of the implemented solutions with guidelines for subsequent implementation - D1.2.4

Luc Girardin, Luise Middelhauve

The foreseen important increase of the penetration of distributed renewable energies technologies into the electricity distribution grid is expected to lead to some major challenges. On the one hand, a large and synchronous production could lead in certain ...

2021

Potential of Photovoltaic Panels on Building Envelopes for Decentralized District Energy Systems

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Luise Middelhauve, Francesco Baldi

The expected increase of the penetration of distributed renewable energy technologies into the electricity grid is expected to lead to major challenges. As a main stakeholder, authorities often lack the appropriate tools to frame and encourage the transiti ...

2021

SCCER JA-RED - A list of possible ancillary services for enhanced grid operation and implementation of the most effective ones at the RE demo site - Deliverable 1.2.3

Luc Girardin, Lionel Benjamin Bloch, Jordan Holweger, Luise Middelhauve

There is a need by distribution system operators and power suppliers to propose ancillary services to enhanced grid operation allowing the optimal deployment of photovoltaic panels, cogeneration technologies and distributed storage. This deliverable theref ...

2020

Key Performance Indicators for Decision Making in Building Energy Systems

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Alessio Santecchia, Luise Middelhauve

Policy makers and energy operator have the responsibility to select indicators for their mission to lead the renewable energy transition ensuring energy independence and security of supply in the context of decarbonisation of the energy mix and and/or nucl ...

2020

Investment Planning Methodology for Complex Urban Energy Systems Applied to a Hospital Site

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Bastien Maxence Bornand, Jean-Loup Sylvain Robineau, Francesca Belfiore

Industrial process integration based on mixed integer linear programming has been used for decades to design and improve industrial processes. The technique has later been extended to solve multi-period and multi-scale problems for the design of urban ener ...

2020

Geographically Parameterized Residential Sector Energy and Service Profile

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Hür Ebuzer Bütün, Raluca-Ancuta Suciu, Ivan Daniel Kantor

The large share of energy consumption in the residential sector has necessitated better understanding and evaluation of the energy needs in this sector, with the objective of identifying possible pathways for improvement. A series of approaches have been u ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2019

IntegrCiTy - D4.4 Report - Implementation of the decision‐support interface with the GIS data base

Luc Girardin

This report presents the implementation of a communication interface to bridge the gap between the semantic 3D city models of the Geographical information system (GIS) database and the scenarios creation environment for decision‐making in the conceptual ph ...

2019

Systematic Integration of Energy-Optimal Buildings With District Networks

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Paul Michael Stadler, Raluca-Ancuta Suciu, Ivan Daniel Kantor

The residential sector accounts for a large share of worldwide energy consumption, yet is difficult to characterise, since consumption profiles depend on several factors from geographical location to individual building occupant behaviour. Given this diffi ...

2019

SCCER JA-RED - Detailed evaluation of the grid operation bottlenecks and load shifting potential for the reference system - Deliverable 1.2.2

Luc Girardin, Lionel Benjamin Bloch, Paul Michael Stadler, Jordan Holweger, Luise Middelhauve

Based on the analysis of the reference case, models developed at the PVLAB-EPFL and IPESEEPFL have been valued and improved to assess the impact of distributed generation and ancillary services on REel demonstrator. The models are used to evaluate solution ...

2019

Solar thermal and geothermal integration with low temperature CO 2 DENs

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Raluca-Ancuta Suciu

Taking into account the high efficiency of solar thermal collectors and the fact that heating demands represent around 80% of the total energy needs in residential buildings, it is of interest to integrate solar thermal systems to supply HVAC services. How ...

Elsevier2018

Contribution of Model Predictive Control in the Integration of Renewable Energy Sources within the Built Environment

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Paul Michael Stadler, Araz Ashouri

Integrating intermittent renewable energy sources has renders the power network operator task of balancing electricity generation and consumption increasingly challenging. Aside from heavily investing in additional storage capacities, an interesting soluti ...

2018

SCCER-FURIES - Design of Sizes for Buildings Energy Systems as a Function of the Grid Evolution - Deliverable 1.4.1a

Luc Girardin, Lionel Benjamin Bloch, Paul Michael Stadler, Jordan Holweger, Hervé Tommasi, Luise Middelhauve

The increasing use of renewable energy is a deep going trend mainly supported by the sustained annual growth rate of solar photovoltaic, wind power and biogases. The expansion and evolution of the distribution grids is therefore a key issue to ensure a sec ...

2018

Energy integration of CO2 networks and Power to Gas for emerging energy autonomous cities in Europe

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Raluca-Ancuta Suciu

The concept of urban CO2 networks has been developed to deploy heat pump based district heating and cooling systems in dense urban areas. The use of the CO2 phase change reduces the cost of the heat distribution while allowing to recover waste heat that is ...

2018

District heating and cooling energy network using CO2 as a heat and mass transfer fluid

Daniel Favrat, Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Samuel Henchoz

The 5th generation compact district heating and cooling networks in a temperature range of 10 to 16 °C have a great potential for energy savings by providing a heat source for decentralized heating heat pumps, a cold source for air-conditioning and a heat ...

2018