Publications by Colin Neil Jones

A multi-modal nocturnal radiative cooling and solar-assisted heating system with model predictive control

Heating and cooling of buildings account for around 15% of all global energy consumption. In light of the ongoing energy transition, we aim to improve the efficiency of both in a European single-family house by using photovoltaic-thermal collectors with a ...

2025

Advancing Distributed AC Optimal Power Flow for Integrated Transmission-Distribution Systems

Colin Neil Jones, Yuning Jiang

This paper introduces a distributed operational solution for integrated transmission-distribution (ITD) system management. A fundamental challenge in designing distributed approaches for AC optimal power flow (OPF) problems in ITD systems is the nonconvexi ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2025

A commissioning-oriented approach to data-driven modeling of buildings with heat pumps for predictive demand response

Colin Neil Jones

As the share of electricity generation from non-dispatchable sources like wind and photovoltaics grows, so does the need for demand response to stabilize the grid. Since the electricity consumption of heat pumps in buildings is both substantial and flexibl ...

Elsevier BV2025

Adaptive data-driven prediction in a building control hierarchy: A case study of demand response in Switzerland

Colin Neil Jones, Christophe Salzmann, Jicheng Shi, Yingzhao Lian

By providing various services, such as Incentive-based Demand Response (IBDR), buildings can play a crucial role in the energy market due to their significant energy consumption. However, effectively commissioning buildings for such desired functionalities ...

2025

Robustly Learning Regions of Attraction From Fixed Data

Colin Neil Jones

While stability analysis is a mainstay for control science, especially computing regions of attraction of equilibrium points, until recently most stability analysis tools always required explicit knowledge of the model or a high-fidelity simulator represen ...

2025

Brunovsky Riccati Recursion for Linear Model Predictive Control

Colin Neil Jones

In almost all algorithms for Model Predictive Control (MPC), the most time-consuming step is to solve some form of Linear Quadratic (LQ) Optimal Control Problem (OCP) repeatedly. The commonly recognized best option for this is a Riccati recursion based sol ...

IEEE2025

Model predictive building climate control for mitigating heat pump noise pollution

Colin Neil Jones, Jicheng Shi

Noise pollution from heat pumps (HPs) has been an emerging concern to their broader adoption, especially in densely populated areas. This paper explores a model predictive control (MPC) approach for climate control of buildings, aimed at minimizing the noi ...

2025

Data-driven adaptive building thermal controller tuning with constraints: A primal-dual contextual Bayesian optimization approach

Colin Neil Jones, Wenjie Xu

We study the problem of tuning the parameters of a room temperature controller to minimize its energy consumption, subject to the constraint that the daily cumulative thermal discomfort of the occupants is below a given threshold. We formulate it as an onl ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2024

Real-time Pricing Mechanism for V2G Using Distributed Bilevel Optimization

Colin Neil Jones, Yuning Jiang

This paper explores the impact of the burgeoning electric vehicle (EV) presence on distribution grid operations, highlighting the challenges they present to conventional pricing strategies due to their dual role as power consumers and suppliers, coupled wi ...

IEEE2024

SOStab: A Matlab toolbox for transient stability analysis

Colin Neil Jones

This paper presents a new Matlab toolbox, aimed at facilitating the use of polynomial optimization for stability analysis of nonlinear systems. In the past decade several decisive contributions made it possible to recast this type of problems as convex opt ...

Elsevier2024