Building Energy Modeling

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16 papers2 papers in the last four weeks, with none the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 23, 2026

Modeling Liquid-Cooled Data Centers in EnergyPlus

As AI workloads accelerate data center transition toward high-density racks with direct-to-chip (DTC) liquid cooling, existing simulation tools remain limited in evaluating whole-building and multi-year efficiency. To bridge this gap, we develop a native EnergyPlus object, ElectricEquipment:ITE:LiquidCooled, that models DTC liquid cooling for chilled-water and warm-water architectures as plant-loop components. It couples facility-water loops, rack-side secondary loops, coolant distribution units, and chip-junction temperatures within a single solver. Validation against an independent Modelica implementation across 21 operating conditions, including two full-year runs compared at one-minute resolution, yields loop-temperature RMSE at or below 0.021 K, well within the 0.1 K acceptance threshold. Our case study demonstrates that warm-water liquid cooling reduces annual PUE from 1.43 to 1.25, eliminates on-site water use, and cuts total facility energy by 37.9% relative to an air-cooled baseline. By embedding liquid-cooling logic into EnergyPlus, our work provides whole-building, long-term energy modeling for high-density AI infrastructure within an open-source framework.

Yun-Dam Ko, Dipashreya A. Sur, Cade Napier +2

Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

Building Energy Modeling Data Center Energy Management Multiphysics Simulation

Oct 7, 2026

NeuralBES: A Differentiable, Control-Aware Emulator for Scalable Building Energy Modeling

Demand-side flexibility i.e. forecasting, shifting, and curtailing residential energy loads, depends on thermal models trusted across millions of heterogeneous buildings. Existing tools force a hard tradeoff: high-fidelity physics simulators such as EnergyPlus are accurate but sequential and require per-building calibration, while purely data-driven sequence models scale but abandon the physical structure that makes their predictions trustworthy. We introduce NeuralBES (Building Energy Simulation), a differentiable emulator that resolves this tradeoff by parameterizing a resistance--capacitance (RC) based thermal model with a shared neural encoder: static building metadata such as floor area, vintage, and HVAC type is mapped to physically bounded capacitances, conductances, and equipment coefficients, which become the coefficients of a scalar linear recurrence solved via a log-space parallel scan, and a predictor--corrector loop closes the thermostat--temperature nonlinearity while preserving full-horizon gradient flow. Trained on the ResStock dataset across three climate zones, NeuralBES handles heterogeneous building archetypes, vintages, and climate zones within a single trained encoder, while black-box baselines produce statistically plausible but physically inconsistent trajectories. On the annual full-year rollout, NeuralBES is the only data-conditioned model that is simultaneously physics-valid and accurate to within 4 MAPE points of the strongest raw-error baseline, while operating at roughly an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the transformer and recurrent baselines; among physics-valid baselines at parameter parity it more than halves the MAPE of the grey-box RC alternative.

Ting-Yu Dai, Takuya Kurihana, Wing Yee Au +1

Fujitsu Research of America

Building Energy Modeling Neural Surrogate Modeling Differentiable Physics

Sep 4, 2026

Large Language Models for HVAC Operations in Building Energy Systems: A Critical Review of Methods, Applications, and Deployment Readiness

Building automation systems generate rich sensor data yet remain insight-poor because heterogeneous point naming, missing metadata, and fragmented documentation obstruct their operational use. This systematic review analyses and codes 66 peer-reviewed studies on large language models (LLMs) for HVAC operations published between 2023 and March 2026. Each study is classified across five application families and three LLM method families and assessed for evidence realism, deployment readiness, and the responsibility boundary between the LLM and physical HVAC decisions. The corpus is concentrated in building energy modelling (BEM, 32 of 66 papers), while load forecasting remains too sparse for subfield-level conclusions. Only four studies reach pilot-level evidence, and none reports sustained operational deployment. No study was classified as ready-now for industry adoption; three were near-term and 63 research-only. Nevertheless, several bounded, human-in-the-loop uses merit near-term trials, including point-name normalisation, document-grounded operator support, BEM workflow assistance, and advisory interfaces around physics-based controllers. Conventional machine learning (ML), model predictive control (MPC), reinforcement learning (RL) and ontology-based tools remain more adopted for high-frequency control, short-horizon numerical forecasting, and well-posed ontology mapping, while autonomous agentic operation and unvalidated occupant proxies remain research-stage. Current evidence therefore supports LLMs primarily as semantic and workflow layers rather than autonomous HVAC controllers. Future work should prioritise field-validated benchmarks, orchestration evaluation under operational constraints, and LLM-MPC/RL architectures with bounded latency and verifiable safety properties.

Alexander Neubauer, Tianzhen Hong, Han Li +4

Language Model-Based Control Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Control Building Energy Management LLM Evaluation Building Energy Modeling

Aug 10, 2026

Full-Feature versus Limited-Input Machine Learning for Residential Energy Estimation: A Comparative Analysis of RECS and ResStock Under Realistic Input Constraints

Residential energy estimates are often needed before detailed envelope characteristics, equipment efficiencies, infiltration, sensor, or billing data are available. This study quantifies the trade-off between predictive accuracy and input accessibility using two nationally representative U.S. residential-energy datasets: the survey-based Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) and the simulation-based ResStock dataset. Full-feature models were first used to establish dataset-specific performance benchmarks. For total-energy estimation, the models were subsequently restricted to ten low-burden variables obtainable from occupants, administrative records, or location-based weather data without an on-site energy audit. Among CatBoost, XGBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest, and Neural Networks, CatBoost consistently achieved the highest predictive performance for the full-feature analysis, reaching R2 = 0.90 for ResStock and R2 = 0.73 for RECS. When the feature set was restricted to ten homeowner-accessible inputs to simulate realistic deployment conditions, model performance converged to R2 = 0.61 for RECS and R2 = 0.62 for ResStock, showing that algorithmic complexity cannot fully compensate for missing physical and behavioral information. However, for a more homogeneous ResStock cohort consisting of single-family detached, natural-gas-heated homes in Climate Zone 6A constructed between 2000 and 2010, a reduced-input model improved accuracy to R2 = 0.85, demonstrating the value of targeted modeling for homogeneous populations. The results indicate that tree-based ensemble models can serve as high-fidelity emulators of national-scale residential energy datasets. However, careful consideration of feature availability, dataset origin (empirical vs. synthetic), and applicable use cases are also important.

Aditya Ramnarayan, Fatih Evren, Patti Gunderson +1

PhD Intern, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory · Researcher, Building Systems Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory · Data Scientist, Building Systems Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Surrogate Modeling Ensemble Learning Tabular Prediction Building Energy Modeling

Aug 7, 2026

ArchEGraph: A Large-Scale Graph Dataset for Geometry-Topology-Physics Aligned Building Energy Modeling

Accurate estimation of building energy use is essential for achieving carbon neutral and sustainable buildings. To better understand the influence of design decisions on building energy use and calibrate machine learning models that can give architects and engineers rapid design feedback, large-scale datasets are needed that explicitly map building geometry to performance. We present ArchEGraph, a large-scale benchmark dataset that represents buildings as heterogeneous graphs with aligned geometry, topology, weather, and zone-level thermal loads. The dataset contains 5,481 buildings and 49,326 validated building-weather simulation cases. In total, it includes over 133,000 space nodes and 1.44 million face nodes, reflecting substantial geometric and topological complexity. Based on ArchEGraph, we define two benchmark tasks: (i) graph reconstruction from polygonal meshes, aiming to recover topological structure from geometric representations; and (ii) topology-informed load prediction, which leverages graph structure and temporal weather conditions to forecast zone-level response time series. We further introduce standardized evaluation protocols for both tasks and conduct cross-building and cross-climate generalization experiments to assess model robustness. ArchEGraph provides a unified testbed for studying geometry-topology-physics coupling in building energy modeling, enabling the development and evaluation of scalable and generalizable surrogate models.

Yihui Li, Yihui Chen, Kaidi Zha +7

Tsinghua University · UC Berkeley · 1Tsinghua University 2UC Berkeley 3MIT +4

Graph Reconstruction Benchmark Construction Building Energy Management Building Energy Modeling

Jun 22, 2026

Where Is My Physics Wrong? Localized and Identifiable Discovery of Model Discrepancy

Hybrid models combine trusted physics with data-driven correction, but a physical model is rarely wrong everywhere or in the same way. The key diagnostic question is local: where does the model fail, what missing mechanism explains the failure, and is the evidence statistically real? Existing sparse-discovery and discrepancy-learning methods usually fit one global correction, which can spread a local error into clean regimes, bias trusted physical parameters, and provide no calibrated significance for selected terms. We introduce LISDD, Localized, Identifiable Sparse Discovery of Discrepancy, a framework that localizes model error to an operating regime, identifies a sparse symbolic form for the missing mechanism, and certifies the discovery with an exact finite-sample test. LISDD fits the known physics on an automatically detected clean regime, flags discrepant regions with a calibrated residual-energy statistic, selects the local missing term by exhaustive holdout over a candidate library, and confirms significance with a sample-split

F

-test. A false-discovery-rate extension handles multiple discrepant regions with different missing mechanisms. In controlled experiments, LISDD keeps physical-parameter bias at 0.002 versus 0.43 for global-discrepancy and black-box baselines, raises localization

F_1

from 0.44 to 0.80, recovers the correct symbolic form with probability one, attains exact detection, and controls the multi-region false-discovery rate while recovering every planted mechanism. The result is a calibrated diagnostic tool for grey-box building-energy models when a fixed physical law silently breaks in one operating regime.

Yifan Wang

Department of Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, QC, H3A 2T7, Canada

Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics Model Misspecification Building Energy Modeling Anomaly Detection

May 31, 2026

Application of Algorithms in Energy-Efficient Design Platforms for Green Building

During green building design, computer-aided energy assessment is widely used to improve efficiency and achieve overall optimization. This paper presents a platform that combines Building Information Modeling (BIM), sensor operational data, and advanced simulation workflows using robust algorithms. The platform uses a multi-layer service architecture with dynamic energy simulation and evolutionary multi-objective optimization, connected via a high-performance C++ core and adaptive agent models. A mid-rise office building was selected as the case study. Five representative areas were chosen to collect data on building envelope characteristics and occupancy patterns. After preprocessing, missing sensor data accounted for 3.2% of annual records, and all variables were standardized using 15-minute interpolation. After 40 optimization rounds, annual energy consumption per square meter dropped by 29.3% from 315 kWh/m2 to 223 kWh/m2. The lifecycle cost increase for occupants was limited to 3.7%, and discomfort hours were reduced to under 70 hours per year. Analysis of Pareto optimal solutions shows that the envelope U-value ranges from 1.05 to 1.57 W/m2K, and nighttime ventilation rate ranges from 2.1 to 3.6 h-1, both closely linked to energy performance. The results confirm that the integrated algorithm framework offers good scalability, strong performance, and technical feasibility for green building design. This platform provides a reliable decision-support tool for design engineers and sustainability practitioners, enabling accurate, data-driven delivery of energy-efficient buildings.

Na Yu, Fu Wenli, Guo Fei

First Highway Engineering Co., Ltd. Chengdu, Sichuan Province, 610000, China

Building Energy Management Building Energy Modeling

May 28, 2026

BuilDyn: Excitation-Driven Data Generation for Building Thermal Dynamics Modeling and Control

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used for data-driven modeling of buildings to enable downstream tasks such as fault detection and diagnosis, and energy-efficient control. While recent work improves generalization across building characteristics, weather, and occupancy, generalization also depends on sufficient exploration of the control-driven system state space. Existing real-world datasets and simulation environments predominantly reflect stationary operation under fixed control policies, resulting in limited excitation and reduced robustness to unseen operating conditions. This paper introduces BuilDyn, a package based on BuilDa that enables customizable excitation strategies for control-oriented data generation. BuilDyn further supports sampling from representative building distributions and provides a Python interface for easy integration into machine learning pipelines. We demonstrate the benefits of BuilDyn by comparing the performance of data-driven ML models trained on non-excited and excited data for one building. With BuilDyn, we hope to advance scalable control-oriented modeling and support future directions such as transfer learning and building-specific foundation models.

Felix Koch, Thomas Krug, Fabian Raisch +2

Technical University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim Rosenheim, Germany · Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Karlsruhe, Germany

Synthetic Data Generation System Identification Building Energy Modeling

May 28, 2026

Uncertainty-Aware Transfer Learning for Cross-Building Energy Forecasting: Toward Robust and Scalable District-Level Energy Management

Scaling data-driven energy forecasting to district level requires models that can be re-used across buildings with minimal target-domain data and honest uncertainty estimates. We present an uncertainty-aware transfer learning (TL) framework for cross-building energy forecasting based on the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT), evaluated on a newly released high-resolution real sub-meter dataset: an educational building at Aalborg University, Denmark (source) and the multi-typology NEST building at EMPA, Switzerland (target). We introduce the Transfer Robustness Index (TRI), an architecture-agnostic metric for quantifying generalization quality across domain gaps. A four-strategy layer-freezing ablation shows that Probe-Only fine-tuning, updating only 455 output-layer parameters out of 806K, achieves the best transfer quality (TRI = 3,097), outperforming full fine-tuning and suggesting that TFT encoders learn transferable temporal representations. Monte Carlo Dropout yields a prediction interval coverage probability of 93.2%, close to the nominal 95% target. A data-scarcity analysis further shows monotonic improvement with increasing target-domain data, providing practical guidance for district energy deployment.

Shadmehr Zaregarizi, Khashayar Yavari

Politecnico di Torino · Turin, Italy

Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting Time Series Forecasting Building Energy Management Monte Carlo Dropout Cross-Domain Transfer Learning Time Series Transformers+2

May 18, 2026

SENSE: Satellite-based ENergy Synthesis for Sustainable Environment

Urban Building Energy Modeling plays a critical role in achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals 7 and 11. Although existing studies based on satellite imagery and deep learning have achieved remarkable progress, many challenges exist: most existing studies are inherently predictive, failing to reflect the generative nature of urban planning; although generative AI and diffusion models have seen explosive growth in satellite imagery, they lack the urban functional generation (e.g., energy layer); third, aligned high-quality high-resolution building energy data with satellite imagery is limited and scarce. Here we propose SENSE (Satellite-based ENergy Synthesis for Sustainable Environment), a unified generative UBEM framework that jointly synthesizes realistic urban satellite imagery and aligned high-quality building energy consumption and height maps. By conditioning on road networks and urban density metrics, SENSE, based on a controllable diffusion model, leverages the knowledge learned by large vision models to generate urban building energy consumption and height information (annotations) in the latent space. Experiments across four cities (New York City, Boston, Lyon, Busan) demonstrate that SENSE achieves high visual fidelity and strong physical consistency, satisfying the ASHRAE standard metric. Experiments demonstrate that SENSE can generate enough annotated synthetic data using less than 20% labeled energy data, boosting downstream prediction performance by 10% IoU. Compared to SOTA urban energy prediction methods, SENSE significantly reduced prediction error (reduced 3%-11% NMBE and 1%-9% CVRMSE). This study offers an energy-efficiency urban planning and physical generation solution for urban science, energy science and building science. The dataset and code: https://huggingface.co/datasets/skl24/MUSE and https://github.com/kailaisun/GenAI4Urban-Energy/.

Kailai Sun, Mingyi He, Heye Huang +5

SMART, Singapore · Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA · University of Florida Gainesville, Florida, USA

Conditional Image Generation Synthetic Data Generation Diffusion Models Building Energy Modeling

May 2, 2026

Toward a foundational thermal model for residential buildings

The building energy community lacks a foundational thermal model, i.e., a single pretrained model capable of generalizing across diverse buildings, climates, and control strategies without building-specific calibration. Achieving this vision requires architectural principles that capture universal thermal dynamics rather than memorizing building-specific patterns. We take a step toward this goal by presenting a physics-informed transformer architecture that embeds domain knowledge, e.g., derivative enrichment and Euler-based numerical integration, into a decoder-only framework. We incorporate static building features extracted from simulation models and employ Rotary Position Embedding attention to capture temporal dependencies. Evaluated on the CityLearn dataset spanning 247 residential buildings across three climate zones, our model achieves one-step prediction accuracy (RMSE of 0.30°C in Texas, 0.29°C in Vermont) while outperforming both traditional baselines and fine-tuned Time-Series Foundation Models. We also demonstrate zero-shot transferability: models trained on as few as two buildings generalize to unseen buildings and climate zones without fine-tuning. Despite the limitation of simulated residential buildings, our results establish physics-informed architectural principles as a promising foundation for universal building thermal models.

Ting-Yu Dai, Kingsley Nweye, Dev Niyogi +1

The University of Texas at Austin · Eindhoven University of Technology

Time Series Forecasting Physics-Informed ML Building Energy Modeling

Apr 23, 2026

Agentic AI-Enabled Framework for Thermal Comfort and Building Energy Assessment in Tropical Urban Neighborhoods

In response to the urban heat island effects and building energy demands in Singapore, this study proposes an agentic AI-enabled reasoning framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with lightweight physics-based models. Through prompt customization, the LLMs interpret urban design tasks, extract relevant policies, and activate appropriate physics-based models for evaluation, forming a closed-loop reasoning-action process. These lightweight physics-based models leverage core thermal and airflow principles, streamlining conventional models to reduce computational time while predicting microclimate variables, such as building surface temperature, ground radiant heat, and airflow conditions, thereby enabling the estimation of thermal comfort indices, e.g., physiological equivalent temperature (PET), and building energy usage. This framework allows users to explore a variety of climate-resilient building surface strategies, e.g., green façades and cool paint applications, that improve thermal comfort while reducing wall heat gain and energy demand. By combining the autonomous reasoning capacity of LLMs with the rapid quantitative evaluation of lightweight physics-based models, the proposed system demonstrates potential for cross-disciplinary applications in sustainable urban design, indoor-outdoor environmental integration, and climate adaptation planning. The source code and data used in this study are available at: https://github.com/PgUpDn/urban-cooling-agent.

Po-Yen Lai, Xinyu Yang, Derrick Low +2

Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR), 1 Fusionopolis Way, #16-16 Connexis, Singapore 138632, Republic of Singapore.

LLM Agents Physics-Based Simulation Building Energy Modeling

Apr 7, 2026

Neural Parameter Estimation of RC Thermal Building Models for Model Predictive Control

Gray-box RC models are widely used to enable energy-efficient model predictive control (MPC) in buildings. However, estimating RC parameters remains difficult, as conventional optimization-based algorithms are prone to local minima, rely heavily on good initial guesses, and incur high computational cost. To address these issues, we propose the Estimator from Scratch, a novel neural parameter estimation approach that embeds the physical equations into a neural network's training process to estimate RC parameters. To further improve estimation accuracy and eliminate dependence on an initial guess, we extend this approach by pretraining the neural network on data from multiple source buildings, the Pretrained Estimator. We benchmark both methods against a genetic-algorithm-based RC estimator and a fully black-box neural network. All methods are evaluated across eight simulated and three real-world buildings for two RC configurations, for both prediction accuracy and closed-loop MPC performance, the latter only for the simulated buildings. The Pretrained Estimator achieves the best prediction performance among all RC-based methods, particularly with little training data, and yields the lowest and least variable MPC costs across buildings and benchmarks. These results position the Pretrained Estimator as a robust, computationally efficient, and initial-guess-free alternative for RC parameter estimation, with potential to extend to other control-oriented dynamical systems.

Fabian Raisch, Timo Germann, Sang-Woo Ham +3

Technical University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim, Rosenheim, Germany · Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany +2

Parameter Estimation Building Energy Modeling Building Energy Management Model Predictive Control

Apr 7, 2026

Thermal-GEMs: Generalized Models for Building Thermal Dynamics

Data-driven models for building thermal dynamics are a scalable approach for enabling energy-efficient operation through fault detection & diagnosis or advanced control. To obtain accurate models, measurement data from a target building spanning months to years are required. Transfer Learning (TL) mitigates this challenge by employing pretrained models based on single or multiple source buildings. General multi-source TL models promise to outperform single-source TL, but alternative multi-source modeling architectures remain to be explored, and evaluation on real-world data is missing. Moreover, time series foundation models (TSFM) have emerged as candidates for the best-performing general models. Hence, we conduct a first, comprehensive assessment of general modeling approaches for building thermal dynamics, including multi-source TL and TSFMs. Our assessment includes ablations using four state-of-the-art multi-source TL architectures and evaluations on synthetic as well as real-world data. We demonstrate that multi-source TL models are highly effective in accurately modeling buildings in real-world applications, yielding up to 63% lower forecasting errors compared to single-source TL. Moreover, our results suggest a trade-off between multi-source TL models exclusively pretrained with building data and TSFMs pretrained with a multitude of different time series, revealing that data from 16-32 source buildings must be available over 1 year for pretraining multi-source TL models to consistently outperform TSFMs as evaluated using the mean absolute error. These findings provide practical guidance for selecting modeling strategies based on the number of source buildings available for pretraining multi-source TL models.

Felix Koch, Fabian Raisch, Benjamin Tischler

Technical University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim, Rosenheim, Germany · Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

Building Energy Modeling Time Series Forecasting Multi-Source Domain Adaptation Building Energy Management Time-Series Foundation Models

Feb 23, 2026

HeatPrompt: Zero-Shot Vision-Language Modeling of Urban Heat Demand from Satellite Images

Accurate heat-demand maps play a crucial role in decarbonizing space heating, yet most municipalities lack detailed building-level data needed to calculate them. We introduce HeatPrompt, a zero-shot vision-language energy modeling framework that estimates annual heat demand using semantic features extracted from satellite images, basic Geographic Information System (GIS), and building-level features. We feed pretrained Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) with a domain-specific prompt to act as an energy planner and extract the visual attributes such as roof age, building density, etc, from the RGB satellite image that correspond to the thermal load. A Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) regressor trained on these captions shows an

R^2

uplift of 93.7% and shrinks the mean absolute error (MAE) by 30% compared to the baseline model. Qualitative analysis shows that high-impact tokens align with high-demand zones, offering lightweight support for heat planning in data-scarce regions.

Kundan Thota, Xuanhao Mu, Thorsten Schlachter +1

Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics (IAI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Building Energy Modeling Building Energy Management Vision-Language Models

Jan 23, 2025

GenTL: A General Transfer Learning Model for Building Thermal Dynamics

Transfer Learning (TL) is an emerging field in modeling building thermal dynamics. This method reduces the data required for a data-driven model of a target building by leveraging knowledge from a source building. Consequently, it enables the creation of data-efficient models that can be used for advanced control and fault detection & diagnosis. A major limitation of the TL approach is its inconsistent performance across different sources. Although accurate source-building selection for a target is crucial, it remains a persistent challenge. We present GenTL, a general transfer learning model for single-family houses in Central Europe. GenTL can be efficiently fine-tuned to a large variety of target buildings. It is pretrained on a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network with data from 450 different buildings. The general transfer learning model eliminates the need for source-building selection by serving as a universal source for fine-tuning. Comparative analysis with conventional single-source to single-target TL demonstrates the efficacy and reliability of the general pretraining approach. Testing GenTL on 144 target buildings for fine-tuning reveals an average prediction error (RMSE) reduction of 42.1 % compared to fine-tuning single-source models.

Fabian Raisch, Thomas Krug, Christoph Goebel +1

Technical University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim Rosenheim, Germany · Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany

Fine-Tuning Transfer Learning Building Energy Modeling