Abstract
Energy efficiency is a major concern to achieve sustainability in modern society. Smart cities sustainability depends on the availability of energy-efficient infrastructures and services. Buildings compose most of the city, and they are responsible for most of the energy consumption and emissions to the atmosphere (40%). Smart cities need smart buildings to achieve sustainability goals. Building’s thermal modeling is essential to face the energy efficiency race. In this paper, we show how ICT and data science technologies and techniques can be applied to evaluate the energy efficiency of buildings. In concrete, we apply machine learning techniques to classify buildings based on their energy efficiency. Particularly, our focus is on single-family buildings in residential areas. Along this paper, we demonstrate the capabilities of machine learning techniques to classify buildings depending on their energy efficiency. Moreover, we analyze and compare the performance of different classifiers. Furthermore, we introduce new parameters which have some impact on the buildings thermal modeling, especially those concerning the environment where the building is located. We also make an insight on ICT and remark the growing relevance in data acquisition and monitoring of relevant parameters by using wireless sensor networks. It is worthy to remark the need for an appropriate and reliable dataset to achieve the best results. Moreover, we demonstrate that reliable classification is feasible with a few featured parameters.
Highlights
Before green-thinking era, energy consumption efficiency was not considered in terms of pollution and green behavior
The database is analyzed again focusing on a specific dataset for which we perform a detailed analysis of the internal in the database where we find the parameters which are more relevant to the classification
Machine learning techniques have become very popular in recent years
Summary
Before green-thinking era (we refer the last decades where governments, in general, are supporting the sustainability), energy consumption efficiency was not considered in terms of pollution and green behavior. The most relevant feature was the efficiency in terms of the ratio of the comfortability (temperature) to cost. The evidence of climate change, motivates governments to regulate the emissions to the atmosphere and pollution in general (earth, air, water). In the 90s, a relevant milestone was achieved: the low-energy building. Swedish and Danish governments published laws requesting that all new buildings required fulfilling the standard. Many of the equipment and devices needed to reduce energy consumption were already available in the market. We can highlight thick insulation, minimized thermal bridges, airtightness, insulated glazing and HVAC
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