Forecast Building Energy Consumption Research Articles

DECODE: Data-driven energy consumption prediction leveraging historical data and environmental factors in buildings

Energy prediction in buildings plays a crucial role in effective energy management. Precise predictions are essential for achieving optimal energy consumption and distribution within the grid. This paper introduces a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model designed to forecast building energy consumption using historical energy data, occupancy patterns, and weather conditions. The LSTM model provides accurate short, medium, and long-term energy predictions for residential and commercial buildings compared to existing prediction models. We compare our LSTM model with established prediction methods, including linear regression, decision trees, and random forest. Encouragingly, the proposed LSTM model emerges as the superior performer across all metrics. It demonstrates exceptional prediction accuracy, boasting the highest R2 score of 0.97 and the most favorable mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.007. An additional advantage of our developed model is its capacity to achieve efficient energy consumption forecasts even when trained on a limited dataset. We address concerns about overfitting (variance) and underfitting (bias) through rigorous training and evaluation on real-world data. In summary, our research contributes to energy prediction by offering a robust LSTM model that outperforms alternative methods and operates with remarkable efficiency, generalizability, and reliability.

Deep Autoencoder-Based Hybrid Network for Building Energy Consumption Forecasting

Deep Autoencoder-Based Hybrid Network for Building Energy Consumption Forecasting

Transformers for Energy Forecast.

Forecasting energy consumption models allow for improvements in building performance and reduce energy consumption. Energy efficiency has become a pressing concern in recent years due to the increasing energy demand and concerns over climate change. This paper addresses the energy consumption forecast as a crucial ingredient in the technology to optimize building system operations and identifies energy efficiency upgrades. The work proposes a modified multi-head transformer model focused on multi-variable time series through a learnable weighting feature attention matrix to combine all input variables and forecast building energy consumption properly. The proposed multivariate transformer-based model is compared with two other recurrent neural network models, showing a robust performance while exhibiting a lower mean absolute percentage error. Overall, this paper highlights the superior performance of the modified transformer-based model for the energy consumption forecast in a multivariate step, allowing it to be incorporated in future forecasting tasks, allowing for the tracing of future energy consumption scenarios according to the current building usage, playing a significant role in creating a more sustainable and energy-efficient building usage.

Interpretable building energy consumption forecasting using spectral clustering algorithm and temporal fusion transformers architecture

Accurate building energy consumption forecasting is crucial for developing efficient building energy management systems, improving energy efficiency, and local building energy supervision and management. However, short-term building energy consumption forecasting is challenging due to highly non-smooth and volatile trends. In this paper, we present a novel methodology that combines interpretable decomposition methods with an interpretable forecasting model. We first illustrate a daily energy consumption pattern recognition (DECPR) method, which decomposes daily energy consumption patterns into interpretable energy consumption subsequences. To achieve satisfactory forecasting performance, we design the vector representation of each subsequence as a static input to the temporal fusion transformers (TFT) model. This vector representation integrates the DECPR method into the TFT model. The TFT model produces interpretable outputs, such as the attention analysis of different step lengths and the visualization of the importance ranking of exogenous variables, including meteorological data, calendar information, and the vector representation. Empirical studies demonstrate that our proposed DECPR-TFT system outperforms comparable models with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 6.11%, which is significantly lower than other models. These interpretable outputs provide valuable insights for researchers seeking to develop energy-saving operation strategies in buildings. Overall, our methodology offers a promising solution for short-term building energy consumption forecasting that can contribute to more efficient building energy management and energy-saving operation strategies.

Transfer learning-based adaptive recursive neural network for short-term non-stationary building heating load prediction

Building energy consumption is a non-stationary time series, and its distribution law changes over time. Traditional machine-learning models are prone to model shift, which leads to a reduction of their prediction accuracy when applied to building energy consumption forecasting. Therefore, in this paper, an adaptive neural network framework is proposed for non-stationary building energy consumption prediction based on transfer learning, in which the training datasets are divided into the most dissimilar periods, and based on the transfer learning mechanism, the different periods of data are learned to obtain the minimum overall loss to improve the model generalization. Taking LSTM and GRU models as examples, adaptive long short-term memory (adaLSTM) and adaptive gated recurrent unit (adaGRU) building energy consumption prediction models are established. The models were trained and verified using heating load data from Xi'an, China. The results show that compared with LSTM model, the coefficient of determination, root mean square error, the coefficient of variation of the root mean squared error and mean absolute error of the adaLSTM model were improved by 0.61%, 37.78%, 38.05% and 30.69%, respectively, and the over-fitting degree was reduced by 227.7%. Compared with the traditional GRU model, the corresponding evaluation indexes of adaGRU were improved by 2.50%, 70.58%, 70.64% and 68.83%, respectively, and the over-fitting degree was improved by 505.7% points. The adaptive recurrent neural network framework proposed in this paper is a generalized approach which can be applied to other non-stationary time series prediction models.

Blending of energy benchmarks models for residential buildings

Building energy consumption forecasting is crucial for energy managers and policymakers. However, acutely predicting the energy consumption of any building is more important in energy efficiency benchmarking of buildings. Energy benchmarking is a precise technique for measuring, tracking, and reducing end-use energy usage of buildings by employing comparative scenarios. Bottom-Up energy consumption assessment has been used in several studies to evaluate a collection of buildings' energy performance to a standard. Traditionally, researchers have used a single approach to predict the energy use of buildings and to conduct benchmarking. However, it has been found that doing so frequently compromises the accuracy of the predicted energy use of buildings. It also has an adverse effect on the buildings' energy benchmarking framework results. This paper will provide an energy benchmarking framework for residential buildings based on the blending techniques of multiple approaches. Over 3000 datasets were gathered from the Indian city of Jaipur. In order to analyse the trends in energy consumption, the data were divided into categories based on economic levels. The data is then subjected to some fundamental statistical analysis, along with several approaches are blended to forecast the energy consumption of the buildings with the highest accuracy. These benchmark levels set guidelines for assessing and recognising strong performance while also identifying underperforming buildings and giving them more priority for energy efficiency improvement. The technique may be used for different metropolitan levels and climatic conditions.

An office building energy consumption forecasting model with dynamically combined residual error correction based on the optimal model

Accurate forecasting of energy consumption in office buildings is of great importance for optimal management of energy consumption and reduction of building energy consumption. A variety of combination forecasting models (FMs) have become the current research hotspots in the field of building energy consumption forecasting. For the problems of large systematic errors and poor generalization ability of existing combination FMs, this paper proposes a dynamic combination residual forecasting model (FM) with the optimal combination approach. Firstly, support vector regression (SVR) is selected as the basic FM, and the SVR residual errors are forecasted by the dynamic combination FM based on the weights, and the SVR forecast value is finally corrected. Further, the basis for the selection of the single FM in the combination model and the optimal number of combination terms are given by mathematical proof in this paper. A case study in Xi’an shows that the dynamic combined residual errors correction FM with the optimal number of terms proposed in this paper can reduce the mean absolute error (MAE) of the basic model from 1918.59 kW to 349.37 kW, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) from 15.80% to 2.96%, and the root mean square error (RMSE) from 2278.74 to 471.44.

Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Statistical Analysis for forecasting building energy consumption — A systematic review

The building sector accounts for 36 % of the total global energy usage and 40% of associated Carbon Dioxide emissions. Therefore, the forecasting of building energy consumption plays a key role for different building energy management applications (e.g., demand-side management and promoting energy efficiency measures), and implementing intelligent control strategies. Thanks to the advancement of Internet of Things in the last few years, this has led to an increase in the amount of buildings energy related-data. The accessibility of this data has inspired the interest of researchers to utilize different data-driven approaches to forecast building energy consumption. In this study, we first present state of-the-art Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Statistical Analysis models that have been used in the area of forecasting building energy consumption. In addition, we also introduce a comprehensive review of the existing research publications that have been published since 2015. The reviewed literature has been categorized according to the following scopes: (I) building type and location; (II) data components; (III) temporal granularity; (IV) data pre-processing methods; (V) features selection and extraction techniques; (VI) type of approaches; (VII) models used; and (VIII) key performance indicators. Finally, gaps and current challenges with respect to data-driven building energy consumption forecasting have been highlighted, and promising future research directions are also recommended.

Multi-Step Short-Term Building Energy Consumption Forecasting Based on Singular Spectrum Analysis and Hybrid Neural Network

Short-term building energy consumption forecasting is vital for energy conservation and emission reduction. However, it is challenging to achieve accurate short-term forecasting of building energy consumption due to its nonlinear and non-stationary characteristics. This paper proposes a novel hybrid short-term building energy consumption forecasting model, SSA-CNNBiGRU, which is the integration of SSA (singular spectrum analysis), a CNN (convolutional neural network), and a BiGRU (bidirectional gated recurrent unit) neural network. In the proposed SSA-CNNBiGRU model, SSA is used to decompose trend and periodic components from the original building energy consumption data to reconstruct subsequences, the CNN is used to extract deep characteristic information from each subsequence, and the BiGRU network is used to model the dynamic features extracted by the CNN for time series forecasting. The subsequence forecasting results are superimposed to obtain the predicted building energy consumption results. Real-world electricity and natural gas consumption datasets of office buildings in the UK were studied, and the multi-step ahead forecasting was carried out under three different scenarios. The simulation results indicate that the proposed model can improve building energy consumption forecasting accuracy and stability.

Forecasting Building Energy Consumption Using Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition, Wavelet Transformation, and Long Short-Term Memory Algorithms

A building, a central location of human activities, is equipped with many devices that consume a lot of electricity. Therefore, predicting the energy consumption of a building is essential because it helps the building management to make better energy management policies. Thus, predicting energy consumption of a building is very important, and this study proposes a forecasting framework for energy consumption of a building. The proposed framework combines a decomposition method with a forecasting algorithm. This study applies two decomposition algorithms, namely the empirical mode decomposition and wavelet transformation. Furthermore, it applies the long short term memory algorithm to predict energy consumption. This study applies the proposed framework to predict the energy consumption of 20 buildings. The buildings are located in different time zones and have different functionalities. The experiment results reveal that the best forecasting algorithm applies the long short term memory algorithm with the empirical mode decomposition. In addition to the proposed framework, this research also provides the recommendation of the forecasting model for each building. The result of this study could enrich the study about the building energy forecasting approach. The proposed framework also can be applied to the real case of electricity consumption.

Forecasting building energy consumption: Adaptive long-short term memory neural networks driven by genetic algorithm

The real-world building can be regarded as a comprehensive energy engineering system; its actual energy consumption depends on complex affecting factors, including various weather data and time signature. Accurate energy consumption forecasting and effective energy system management play an essential part in improving building energy efficiency. The multi-source weather profile and energy consumption data could enable integrating data-driven models and evolutionary algorithms to achieve higher forecasting accuracy and robustness. The proposed building energy consumption forecasting system consists of three layers: data acquisition and storage layer, data pre-processing layer and data analytics layer. The core part of the data analytics layer is a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) and long-short term memory (LSTM) neural network model for accurate and robust energy prediction. LSTM neural network is adopted to capture the interrelationship between energy consumption data and time. GA is adopted to select the optimal architecture for LSTM neural networks to improve its forecasting accuracy and robustness. The hyper-parameters for determining LSTM architecture include the number of LSTM layers, number of neurons in each LSTM layer, dropping rate of each LSTM layer and network learning rate. Meanwhile, the effects of historical weather profile and time horizon of past information are also investigated. Two real-life educational buildings are adopted to test the performance of the proposed building energy consumption forecasting system. Experiments reveal that the proposed adaptive LSTM neural network performs better than the existing feedforward neural network and LSTM-based prediction models in accuracy and robustness. It also outperforms those LSTM networks whose hyper-parameters are determined by grid search, Bayesian optimisation and PSO. Such accurate energy consumption prediction can play an essential role in various areas, including daily building energy management, decision making of facility managers, building information model designs, net-zero energy operation, climate change mitigation and circular economy.

Artificial Neural Networks to Optimize Zero Energy Building (ZEB) Projects from the Early Design Stages

Building energy modeling (BEM) is used to support (nearly) zero-energy building (ZEB) projects, since this kind of software represents the only available option to forecast building energy consumption with high accuracy. BEM may also be used during preliminary analyses or feasibility studies, but simulation results are usually too detailed for this stage of the project. Aside from that, when optimization algorithms are used, the implied high number of energy simulations causes very long calculation times. Therefore, designers could be discouraged from the extensive use of BEM to conduct optimization analyses. Thus, they prefer to study and compare a very limited amount of acknowledged alternative designs. In relation to this problem, the scope of the present study is to obtain an easy-to-use tool to quickly forecast the energy consumption of a building with no direct use of BEM to support fast comparative analyses at the early stages of energy projects. In response, a set of automatic energy assessment tools was developed based on machine learning techniques. The forecasting tools are artificial neural networks (ANNs) that are able to estimate the energy consumption automatically for any building, based on a limited amount of descriptive data of the property. The ANNs are developed for the Po Valley area in Italy as a pilot case study. The ANNs may be very useful to assess the energy demand for even a considerable number of buildings by comparing different design options, and they may help optimization analyses.

A Data-Driven Approach to Forecasting Heating and Cooling Energy Demand in an Office Building as an Alternative to Multi-Zone Dynamic Simulation

Nowadays, as more data is now available from an increasing number of installed sensors, load forecasting applied to buildings is being increasingly explored. The amount and quality of resulting information can provide inputs for smarter decisions when managing and operating office buildings. In this article, the authors use two data-driven methods (artificial neural networks and support vector machines) to predict the heating and cooling energy demand in an office building located in Lisbon, Portugal. In the present case-study, these methods prove to be an accurate and appealing alternative to the use of accurate but time-consuming multi-zone dynamic simulation tools, which strongly depend on several parameters to be inserted and user expertise to calibrate the model. Artificial neural networks and support vector machines were developed and parametrized using historical data and different sets of exogenous variables to encounter the best performance combinations for both the heating and cooling periods of a year. In the case of support vector regression, a variation introduced simulated annealing to guide the search for different combinations of hyperparameters. After a feature selection stage for each individual method, the results for the different methods were compared, based on error metrics and distributions. The outputs of the study include the most suitable methodology for each season, and also the features (historical load records, but also exogenous features such as outdoor temperature, relative humidity or occupancy profile) that led to the most accurate models. Results clearly show there is a potential for faster, yet accurate machine-learning based forecasting methods to replace well-established, very accurate but time-consuming multi-zone dynamic simulation tools to forecast building energy consumption.

A Review of Energy Consumption Forecasting in Smart Buildings: Methods, Input Variables, Forecasting Horizon and Metrics

Buildings are among the largest energy consumers in the world. As new technologies have been developed, great advances have been made in buildings, turning conventional buildings into smart buildings. These smart buildings have allowed for greater supervision and control of the energy resources within the buildings, taking steps to energy management strategies to achieve significant energy savings. The forecast of energy consumption in buildings has been a very important element in these energy strategies since it allows adjusting the operation of buildings so that energy can be used more efficiently. This paper presents a review of energy consumption forecasting in smart buildings for improving energy efficiency. Different forecasting methods are studied in nonresidential and residential buildings. Following this, the literature is analyzed in terms of forecasting objectives, input variables, forecasting methods and prediction horizon. In conclusion, the paper examines future challenges for building energy consumption forecasting.

Research on EA-Xgboost Hybrid Model for Building Energy Prediction

Building energy forecast plays an important role in Intelligent Building. Due to its non-stationarity and uncertainty, the prediction accuracy of existing methods need to be further improved. In view of this problem, propose the EA-XGBoost model, which combines Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), ARIMA and XGBoost model to predict building energy consumption. First, EMD is used to decompose the consumption data into multiple Intrinsic Mode Functions(IMF). Afterwards, ARIMA model is applied for each IMF to get regression result, then sum the results and calculate the residual. Taking the residual as an input feature of XGBoost, combined with other energy-related factors such as dry and wet bulb temperature, using XGBoost after Grid-Search to predict building energy consumption data. Compared with ARIMA and XGBoost model, EA-XGBoost hybrid model performs best in forecasting building energy consumption dataset which provided by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The experiment shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the new model.

A novel hybrid modelling structure fabricated by using Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy to forecast HVAC systems energy demand in real-time for Basra city

the HVAC systems consume more than half of the total buildings energy demand, forecasting the cooling/heating load of the building is important to predict buildings energy demand. The energy assessment tools such as a model for forecasting building energy consumption is based on outdoor thermal conditions, the outdoor conditions are highly nonlinear in real life cannot be represented by linear differential equations and have an uncertain disturbance nature. This paper contrives a novel nonlinear model structure to cope with such difficulty, which is composed of two hybrid nonlinear forms, Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy system (TS-FS) and Neural Networks’ Weights. Such a structure has many advantages, including suitability for multi-layer implementations like an integrated eight-dimension net of parameters and weights which represents model input-output relations of a nonlinear system. The Gauss-Newton algorithm is used to tune model weights and parameters for the fitting of nonlinear regression of clusters model to data. The main feature of the proposed model is to express the dynamic conditions of the outdoor thermal environment of each fuzzy implication by a cluster functions model and thus promote the prediction performance. The overall proposed model is tested on the training and validation of multizone then compared with the RLF model. The corresponding results show that a better hybrid modelling and uncertainty mitigation which is achieved without significant loss of prediction accuracy.

A novel improved model for building energy consumption prediction based on model integration

Building energy consumption prediction plays an irreplaceable role in energy planning, management, and conservation. Constantly improving the performance of prediction models is the key to ensuring the efficient operation of energy systems. Moreover, accuracy is no longer the only factor in revealing model performance, it is more important to evaluate the model from multiple perspectives, considering the characteristics of engineering applications. Based on the idea of model integration, this paper proposes a novel improved integration model (stacking model) that can be used to forecast building energy consumption. The stacking model combines advantages of various base prediction algorithms and forms them into “meta-features” to ensure that the final model can observe datasets from different spatial and structural angles. Two cases are used to demonstrate practical engineering applications of the stacking model. A comparative analysis is performed to evaluate the prediction performance of the stacking model in contrast with existing well-known prediction models including Random Forest, Gradient Boosted Decision Tree, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Machine, and K-Nearest Neighbor. The results indicate that the stacking method achieves better performance than other models, regarding accuracy (improvement of 9.5%–31.6% for Case A and 16.2%–49.4% for Case B), generalization (improvement of 6.7%–29.5% for Case A and 7.1%-34.6% for Case B), and robustness (improvement of 1.5%–34.1% for Case A and 1.8%–19.3% for Case B). The proposed model enriches the diversity of algorithm libraries of empirical models.

A hybrid model for building energy consumption forecasting using long short term memory networks

Data driven building energy consumption forecasting models play a significant role in enhancing the energy efficiency of the buildings through building energy management, energy operations, and control strategies. The multi-source and heterogeneous energy consumption data necessitates the integration of evolutionary algorithms and data-driven models for better forecast accuracy and robustness. We present eDemand, an energy consumption forecasting model which employs long short term memory networks and improved sine cosine optimization algorithm for accurate and robust building energy consumption forecasting. A novel Haar wavelet based mutation operator was introduced to enhance the divergence nature of sine cosine optimization algorithm towards the global optimal solution. Further, the hyperparameters (learning rate, weight decay, momentum, and number of hidden layers) of the LSTM were optimized using the improved sine cosine optimization algorithm. A case study on the real-time energy consumption data obtained from Kanwal Rekhi building, an academic building at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay for short, mid, and long-term forecasting. Experiments reveal that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art energy consumption forecast models in terms of mean absolute error, mean absolute percentage error, mean square error, root mean square error, and Theil statistics. It is shown that stable and accurate forecast results are produced by ISCOA-LSTM and hence it can be used as an efficient tool for solving energy consumption forecast problems.

Research on Building Energy Consumption Prediction Method Based on LSTM Network

Building energy consumption forecasting is of great significance to building energy conservation. The accuracy of traditional building energy consumption forecasting methods is inadequate. Based on the extensive application of LSTM neural network in time series forecasting, this paper uses LSTM neural network to establish building energy consumption forecasting model, collects energy consumption training data through building energy consumption monitoring system, and proves LSTM by comparing the forecasting effect of LSTM neural network and BP neural network. LSTM neural network is superior to BP neural network in convergence speed and prediction accuracy.

Study on deep reinforcement learning techniques for building energy consumption forecasting

Reliable and accurate building energy consumption prediction is becoming increasingly pivotal in building energy management. Currently, data-driven approach has shown promising performances and gained lots of research attention due to its efficiency and flexibility. As a combination of reinforcement learning and deep learning, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques are expected to solve nonlinear and complex issues. However, very little is known about DRL techniques in forecasting building energy consumption. Therefore, this paper presents a case study of an office building using three commonly-used DRL techniques to forecast building energy consumption, namely Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C), Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Recurrent Deterministic Policy Gradient (RDPG). The objective is to investigate the potential of DRL techniques in building energy consumption prediction field. A comprehensive comparison between DRL models and common supervised models is also provided.The results demonstrate that the proposed DDPG and RDPG models have obvious advantages in forecasting building energy consumption compared to common supervised models, while accounting for more computation time for model training. Their prediction performances measured by mean absolute error (MAE) can be improved by 16%-24% for single-step ahead prediction, and 19%-32% for multi-step ahead prediction. The results also indicate that A3C performs poor prediction accuracy and shows much slower convergence speed than DDPG and RDPG. However, A3C is still the most efficient technique among these three DRL methods. The findings are enlightening and the proposed DRL methodologies can be positively extended to other prediction problems, e.g., wind speed prediction and electricity load prediction.