Combined cooling, heating and power (CCHP) systems are known as trigeneration systems, designed to provide electricity, cooling and heating simultaneously. The CCHP system has become a hot topic for its high system efficiency, high economic efficiency and less greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in recent years. The efficiency of the CCHP system depends on the appropriate system configuration, operation strategy and facility size. Due to the inherent and inevitable energy waste of the traditional operation strategies, i.e., following the electric load (FEL) and following the thermal load (FTL), more efficient operation strategy should be designed. To achieve the highest system efficiency, facilities in the system should be sized to match with the corresponding operation strategy. In order to reduce the energy waste in traditional operation strategies and improve the system efficiency, two operation strategy design methods and sizing problems are studied (In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3).

Most of the improved operation strategies in the literature are based on the ''balance'' plane, which implies the match of the electric demands and thermal demands. However, in more than 95% energy demand patterns, the demands cannot match with each other at this exact ''balance'' plane. To continuously use the ''balance'' concept, in Chapter 2, the system configuration is modified from the one with single absorption chiller to be the one with hybrid chillers and expand the ''balance'' plane to be a ''balance'' space by tuning the electric cooling to cool load ratio. With this new ''balance'' space, an operation strategy is designed and the power generation unit (PGU) capacity is optimized according to the proposed operation strategy to reduce the energy waste and improve the system efficiency. A case study is conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed operation strategy.

In Chapter 3, a more mathematical approach to schedule the energy input and power flow is proposed. By using the concept of energy hub, the CCHP system is modelled in a matrix form. As a result, the whole CCHP system is an input-output model. Setting the objective function to be a weighted summation of primary energy savings (PESs), hourly total cost savings (HTCs) and carbon dioxide emissions reduction (CDER), the optimization problem, constrained by equality and inequality constraints, is solved by the sequential quadratic programming (SQP). The PGU capacity is also sized under the proposed optimal operation strategy. In the case study, compared to FEL and FTL, the proposed optimal operation strategy saves more primary energy and annual total cost, and can be more environmental friendly.

Finally, the conclusions of this thesis is summarized and some future work is discussed.