Estimation of Room-Level Cooling Energy in Hot/Arid Climate by Machine Learning-Based Approaches

Abstract Building energy models (BEM) are developed for understanding a buildings energy performance. A meta-model of the whole building energy analysis is often used for the BEM calibration and energy prediction. The literature review shows that studies with a focus on the development of room-level meta-models are missing. This study aims to address this research gap through a case study of a residential building with 138 apartments in Doha, Qatar. Five parameters, including cooling setpoint, number of occupants, lighting power density, equipment power density, and interior solar reflectance, are selected as input parameters to create ninety-six different scenarios. Three machine-learning models are used as meta-models to generalize the relationship between cooling energy and the model parameters, including Multiple Linear Regression, Support Vector Regression, and Artificial Neural Networks. The three meta-models prediction accuracies are evaluated by the Normalized Mean Bias Error (NMBE), Coefficient of Variation of the Root Mean Squared Error CV (RMSE), and R square (R2). The results show that the ANN model performs best. A new generic BEM is then established to validate the meta-model. The results indicate that the proposed meta-model is accurate and efficient in predicting the cooling energy in summer and transitional months for a building with a similar floor configuration.

Estimation of Room-Level Cooling Energy in Hot/Arid Climate by Machine Learning-Based Approaches Conference Paper