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Given the urgency of climate change, development of fast and reliable methods is essential to understand urban building energy use in the sector that accounts for 40% of total energy use in USA. Although machine learning (ML) methods may offer promise and are less difficult to develop, discrepancy in methods, results, and recommendations have emerged that requires attention. Existing research also shows inconsistencies related to integrating climate change models into energy modeling. To address these challenges, four models: random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), single regression tree, and multiple linear regression (MLR), were developed using the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey dataset to predict energy use intensity (EUI) under projected heating and cooling degree days by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) across the USA during the 21st century. The RF model provided better performance and reduced the mean absolute error by 4%, 11%, and 12% compared to XGBoost, single regression tree, and MLR, respectively. Moreover, using the RF model for climate change analysis showed that office buildings’ EUI will increase between 8.9% to 63.1% compared to 2012 baseline for different geographic regions between 2030 and 2080. One region is projected to experience an EUI reduction of almost 1.5%. Finally, good data enhance the predicting ability of ML therefore, comprehensive regional building datasets are crucial to assess counteraction of building energy use in the face of climate change at finer spatial scale.
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A Novel Hybrid Modeling Method for Predicting Energy Use of Hydronic Radiant Slab Systems
Accurately predicting the performance of radiant slab systems can be challenging due to the large thermal capacitance of the radiant slab and room temperature stratification. Current methods for predicting heating and cooling energy consumption of hydronic radiant slabs include detailed first-principles (e.g., finite difference) and reduced-order (e.g., thermal Resistor-Capacitor (RC) network) models. Creating and calibrating detailed first-principles models, as well as detailed RC network models for predicting the performance of radiant slabs require substantial effort. To develop improved control, monitoring, and diagnostic methods, there is a need for simpler models that can be readily trained using in-situ measurements. In this study, we explored a novel hybrid modeling method that integrates a simple RC network model with an evolving learning-based algorithm termed the Growing Gaussian Mixture Regression (GGMR) modeling approach to predict the heating and cooling rates of a radiant slab system for a Living Laboratory office space. The RC network model predicts heating or cooling load of the radiant slab system that is provided as an input to the GGMR model. Three modeling approaches were considered in this study: 1) an RC network model; 2) a GGMR model, and 3) the proposed hybrid modeling between RC and GGMR. The three modeling methods have been compared for predicting the energy use of a radiant slab system of a Living Laboratory office space using measurement data from January 15th to March 7th, 2022. The first two weeks of data were used for training, while the remaining data was used for testing of all three modeling methods. The hybrid approach had a Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) of 15.46 percent (8.62 percent less than the RC-Model 3 alone and 19.36 percent less than the GGMR alone), a Coefficient of Variation of RMSE (CVRMSE) of 6.43 percent (3.59 percent less than the RC-Model 3 and 8.05 percent less than the GGMR), a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 3.61 kW (2.13 kW and 3.87 kW less than the RC-Model 3 and GGMR, respectively), and a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 5.28 percent (3.85 percent and 3.92 percent lower than the RC-Model 3 and GGMR, respectively).
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- Award ID(s):
- 1929209
- PAR ID:
- 10417460
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International High Performance Buildings Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3470
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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