Topology modeling and energy efficiency prediction of parallel chillers based on deep learning

To address the insufficient energy efficiency prediction accuracy caused by topological coupling in the parallel operation of multiple chillers, this study proposes a physics-guided spatiotemporal fusion model combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). The LSTM module extracts temporal features from single-unit energy consumption sequences; the GCN module captures spatial dependencies through constructed topological graphs representing cooling water networks and load distribution relationships. Based on the operational data from a large-scale data center cooling station, the model is trained and tested using 128 million raw records along with 8000 h of simulation data. Experimental results demonstrate that the GCN-LSTM model achieves a 19.4% reduction in Root Mean Square Error and a 2.06% decrease in Mean Absolute Percentage Error compared to standalone LSTM models at 30-min prediction intervals. The ablation experiment further verifies the necessity of GCN for spatial modeling, and its absence led to a significant increase in prediction error. The proposed GCN-LSTM architecture surpasses traditional single-model performance limitations and provides an adaptable solution for multi-equipment collaborative optimization. This approach establishes a new technical path for industrial energy conservation and intelligent control systems.