This paper proposes and demonstrates the effectiveness of an economic model predictive control (MPC) technique in reducing energy and demand costs for building heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. A simulated multi-zone commercial building equipped with of variable air volume (VAV) cooling system is built in Energyplus. With the introduced Building Controls Virtual Test Bed (BCVTB) as middleware, real-time data exchange between Energyplus and a Matlab controller is realized by sending and receiving sockets. System identification is performed to obtain zone temperature and power models, which are used in the MPC framework. The economic objective function in MPC accounts for the daily electricity costs, which include time-of-use (TOU) energy charge and demand charge. In each time step, a min-max optimization is formulated and converted into a linear programming problem and solved. In a weekly simulation, a pre-cooling effect during off-peak period and a cooling discharge from the building thermal mass during on-peak period can be observed. Cost savings by MPC are estimated by comparing with the baseline and other open-loop control strategies. The effect of several experimental factors in the MPC configuration is investigated and the best scenario is selected for future practical tests. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.