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The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in buildings can assist in reducing energy consumption through enhanced control, automation, and reliability. This review aims to explore the use of AI to enhance energy efficiency throughout various stages of the building lifecycle, including building design, construction, operation and control, maintenance, and retrofit. The review encompasses multiple studies in the field published between 2018 and 2023. These studies were identified...

With increasing energy consumption, how to achieve the energy-saving operation of air-conditioning systems is crucial for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. The accurate and reliable energy consumption prediction of air-conditioning systems can be useful for optimizing the energy supply and equipment operation strategies. However, most existing studies focus on the prediction of the long-term energy consumption of air-conditioning systems, which usually exceeds the individual...

Model-based optimal control has proven its effectiveness in optimizing the performance of central air-conditioning systems in terms of thermal comfort and energy efficiency. It was often assumed that temperature distribution in the entire air-conditioned space is uniform and can be represented by a single or averaged measurement in optimization. However, actual distribution in the air-conditioned space is usually uneven, which can affect thermal comfort and indoor air quality. The dynamics...

Energy studies of buildings are becoming more widespread as stakeholders strive to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. As a result, there is an increased need for novel numerical techniques to automatically calibrate building energy models (BEMs) for these energy studies. In this paper, a new automated building calibration methodology was developed, which uses a surrogate (i.e., meta) multilayer perceptron artificial neural network (ANN) to infer unknown building...

This paper aims to develop long-term adaptation strategies for the existing Canadian school buildings under extreme current and future climates using a developed methodology based on global and local sensitivity analysis and Multi-Objective Optimization Genetic Algorithm. The calibrated simulation model based on indoor and outdoor measured temperature for a school of interest is used to evaluate the optimization strategies. This paper aims to search for the optimum school building design...

Canadian buildings have been primarily designed to withstand cold and long winters, not hot summers. With climate change and the increase in the intensity and severity of heatwaves, it has become important to investigate overheating in buildings. However, there are limited studies on assessing and mitigating the overheating risk in existing buildings that house vulnerable populations in cold climates, especially in Canada. This paper provides a framework for the systematic assessment of...

This paper aims to develop long-term adaptation strategies for the existing Canadian school buildings under extreme current and future climates using a developed methodology based on global and local sensitivity analysis and Multi-Objective Optimization Genetic Algorithm. The calibrated simulation model based on indoor and outdoor measured temperature for a school of interest is used to evaluate the optimization strategies. This paper aims to search for the optimum school building design...

Climate-sensitive school buildings can enhance students’ learning performance and reduce the building’s overall energy consumption. This paper reports on a post-occupancy study of contemporary school buildings in Malaysia, assessing problems of solar heat gain. The research aims to propose retrofitting measures based on passive design principles adapted specifically for the Malaysian tropical climate to strengthen the resilience of local school buildings in a global climate emergency....

Energy Poverty (EP) is a widespread problem in Europe. EP detection is hampered by a lack of data and global metrics. Recently, innovative approaches using Artificial Intelligent (AI) techniques have been increasingly applied for the EP alleviation. In this work, studies focused on the application of AI on EP were studied. It was identified that there is not a high number of works that apply AI to fight against EP (considering this problem as a multidimensional phenomenon). Artificial Neural...

The occupants' presence, activities, and behaviour can significantly impact the building's performance and energy efficiency. Currently, heating, ventilation, and airconditioning (HVAC) systems are often run based on assumed occupancy levels and fixed schedules, or manually set by occupants based on their comfort needs. However, the unpredictability and variability of occupancy patterns can lead to over/under the conditioning of space when using such approaches, affecting indoor air quality...

The occupants' presence, activities, and behaviour can significantly impact the building's performance and energy efficiency. Currently, heating, ventilation, and airconditioning (HVAC) systems are often run based on assumed occupancy levels and fixed schedules, or manually set by occupants based on their comfort needs. However, the unpredictability and variability of occupancy patterns can lead to over/under the conditioning of space when using such approaches, affecting indoor air quality...

This study investigated children’s perceptions and adaptive behaviors related to indoor thermal conditions of classrooms in primary schools with no air-conditioning systems during both summer and winter in Dehradun City, Uttarakhand, India. Responses were collected from 5297 school children aged 6–13 years. During the measurement periods, 100% and 94% of the samples were obtained under conditions outside an 80% thermally acceptable comfort range in winter and summer, respectively. The...

Building Energy prediction has emerged as an active research area due to its potential in improving energy efficiency in building energy management systems. Essentially, building energy prediction belongs to the time series forecasting or regression problem, and data-driven methods have drawn more attention recently due to their powerful ability to model complex relationships without expert knowledge. Among those methods, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have proven to be one of the most...

Occupant behaviour (OB) is one of the main causes of the energy performance gap between buildings’ performance prediction versus reality, since, due to its uncertainty and unpredictability, it is often oversimplified in the building performance simulation (BPS). Hence, previous studies developed OB models, mainly in the residential and office contexts, in order to predict and represent human behaviour in BPS. Yet, school buildings are different from other typologies due to contextual factors...

Nafta is an oasis located in the governorate of Tozeur in the South of Tunisia. The unique natural and built environment it offers has been degrading due to climate change, pollution, and overexploitation. Additionally, the new residential districts are unsuitable for the desert climate of the area. Not only do they fail to provide thermal comfort, especially during the heat waves, but also they contain non-eco-friendly materials such as concrete. However, we notice that the vernacular...

Surprisingly or not, agriculture can be a crucial sector that either enables or impedes the transition towards sustainable development of urban areas. This is also the case for the emerging megacity of Hyderabad. Several rural-urban linkages support this perspective: (a) migration patterns, dependent on agricultural and rural income, and development paths; (b) the food security and provisioning dimension, especially relevant in the case of perishable agricultural commodities that cannot be...

Educational buildings form a significant part of non-residential buildings that are of public use, and, in the case of Cyprus, this building stock tends to be less energy-efficient compared to a number of other public building typologies. Moreover, it is the purpose, frequency of use and user density of these buildings that make them a special case for study. These buildings are no longer fit for their assigned purpose as they require significant energy for heating in the winter and cooling...

This article deals with the possibilities the lighting retrofit and the life cycle cost analysis economic analysis in the process of increasing the energy efficiency of buildings. It contains basic information about lighting retrofit and the life cycle cost analysis and its implementation for cost estimation for a building lighting system. The accuracy of the life cycle cost analysis was verified on three lighting systems. The first system consisted of an old (original) lighting system that...

Since the thermal condition of living spaces affects the occupants' productivity and their quality of life, it is important to design effective heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) control strategies for better energy efficiency and thermal comfort. An essential step in HVAC control and energy optimization is thermal comfort modeling. Recently, data-driven thermal comfort models have been preferred over the Fanger's Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) model due to higher accuracy and ease...