Software Engineering for AI-driven Building Operation

Buildings cause nearly 40% of carbon emissions in the US. Of total building emissions, HVAC systems are responsible for approximately 40-60% and account for 15% of global energy consumption. Despite advances in artificial intelligence, most buildings still operate as inefficiently as they did decades ago. Building optimization, perhaps more so than any other optimization problem, has enormous potential for Machine Learning (ML) driven impact on climate change, in both the short and long term. One of the biggest obstacles for building optimization is the lack of policy transfer. Most building control systems, whether simulation or learning based, don't generalize: they only work well for the building they were developed for, but not for other buildings. To solve this problem, we propose a challenge for the development of building foundation models that easily adapt to new buildings with minimal configuration and thereby enable building optimization to scale across the globe. Participants will build control policies on a set of simulated buildings, and have their policies evaluated on an unseen set of buildings. The buildings vary in size, layout, weather, material properties, and HVAC system. Successful outcomes from this initiative promise a massive leap forward in global sustainability efforts and demonstrate the great potential of ML to combat climate change.

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems are becoming the interface to buildings, answering questions and controlling operations, but a building's readiness for them has not been systematically assessed. This study proposes a framework to quantify it. First, a building's knowledge graph sets two ceilings. The answerable-readiness ceiling is the share of operational questions its data could answer, and the actuation-readiness ceiling is the share of control actions it exposes. Second, a reference AI agent's accuracy on a fixed set of these questions shows how much of the ceilings is realized. On a simulated office, the agent realizes 0.62 of a 0.64 answerable ceiling, so missing data, not the AI, limit readiness, except in naming a fault's cause. Across 37 public real-building graphs, the median answerable ceiling is 0.16, and in 15 of 45, unlinked sensors lower it. The framework turns "is this building AI-ready?" into an auditable, ranked retrofit question.

Effective AI adoption in cyber-physical systems (CPS) depends on embedding design knowledge into engineering practice. Yet as AI-enabled components increasingly replace analytically derived control laws, this occurs without a systematic understanding of how controller architectures differ or remain similar across paradigms. We address this gap with an empirical study of traditional and AI-enabled Simulink controllers, guided by a literature-derived taxonomy of ten structural categories and nine functional roles. The study analyzes 62 real-world models spanning 8 controller types and 10 application domains, and surveys 13 practitioners, identifying three architectural tensions. First, subsystem organization dominates all controller structures regardless of paradigm, occupying 68-72% of controller footprint, while core control logic occupies minimal space. Second, AI-enabled controllers rely heavily on discrete dynamics and user-defined abstraction, categories largely absent from AI literature, exposing a gap between described and implemented architectures. Third, constraint enforcement blocks largely disappear from AI-enabled models despite practitioner expectations. This reveals a misalignment where safety mechanisms shift from explicit structure to implicit training-time artifacts, breaking traceability.