Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Control

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Overview

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning control studies how to operate building systems to balance energy costs, occupant comfort, ventilation, and equipment limits. Controllers range from rule-based methods, PID, and model predictive control to reinforcement learning methods such as Soft Actor-Critic and Proximal Policy Optimization, often paired with safety filters or physics-informed models. Researchers test these approaches in EnergyPlus, BOPTEST, and other building simulators, while exploring transfer across buildings, occupancy-aware operation, demand flexibility, and multi-zone coordination. A central challenge is showing reliable real-world benefits: simulated energy savings must hold up under changing buildings and occupants without compromising comfort, air quality, or operational safety.

Latest papers

CardsList

21 papers1 paper in the last four weeks, down 67% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. One Agent per Zone: Decentralised Active Inference under Partial Observability for Multi-Zone HVAC Control on Edge Hardware

    Oct 14, 2026Panagiotis Kasnesis, Lazaros Toumanidis, Christos Chatzigeorgiou +2Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning ControlBuilding Energy Management

    Waldiez P.C., Maroussi, Greece · ThinGenious P.C., Maroussi, Greece · PRAESC AI, Biel, Switzerland

  2. Heating in human-HVAC interaction for smart homes: An interdisciplinary overview

    Sep 20, 2026Delong Korus-Du, Gunnar Stevens, Alexander Boden +6Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning ControlBuilding Energy Management

    Department of Human-Computer Interaction, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany · Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany · Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands +2

  3. Generalizing HVAC Control With Domain Randomized Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 5, 2026Pablo Boitel, Kun ZhangHeating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning ControlRL Control

    École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) Montréal, Québec, Canada

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

    Sep 4, 2026Alexander Neubauer, Tianzhen Hong, Han Li +4Language Model-Based ControlHeating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Control

  5. ADAPT: Physics-Aware Diffusion-based World Models for Adaptive Predictive Transferable HVAC Control

    Aug 20, 2026Xu Yang, Kailai Sun, Dianyu Zhong +1Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning ControlBuilding Energy Management

    Department of Automation Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · SMART, Singapore Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA

  6. From Thermal Preference Prediction to Adaptive Thermal Intervention: A Reinforcement Learning Approach Using Physiological and Environmental Sensing

    Aug 19, 2026Isibor Kennedy Ihianle, Emmanuel Manu, Ehsan Asnaashari +4Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning ControlRL Control

    Department of Computer Science, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, United Kingdom · York University, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada

  7. Contextual Quality-Diversity Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning for HVAC Control in Tropical Commercial Buildings

    Aug 11, 2026Tran Le VuReinforcement LearningBuilding Energy Management

  8. Learning to Modulate, Not to Cycle: Soft Actor---Critic Recovers Inverter-Style Heat-Pump Control

    Aug 10, 2026Faizan Ahmed, Aniket Dixit, James BruseyRL ControlFeedback Control

    Centre for Computational Science and Mathematical Modelling, Coventry University, United Kingdom

  9. Exact Action Values Are Not Enough: Rollout-Verified Reinforcement Fine-Tuning of a Reasoning Model for Multi-Zone VAV Control

    Jul 30, 2026Takumi Shioda, Kohei Terashima, Tatsuo NagaiLanguage Model-Based ControlModel-Free RL

    The University of Tokyo · Tokyo University of Science

  10. Building2Building: A Large Scale Benchmark for Generalizable Real-World Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 17, 2026Vincent Taboga, Justin Veilleux, Doseok Jang +2RL BenchmarksReinforcement Learning

    1Mila - Quebec AI Institute · 2Université de Montréal - Département d’Informatique et de Recherche Opérationnelle

  11. ThermoLLM: Thermodynamics-Aware HVAC Control with Spatial-Semantic Knowledge Graph

    Jun 22, 2026Kirtan Bhatt, Xiachong Lin, Matthew Amos +2Language Model-Based ControlBuilding Energy Management

    UNSW Sydney · Sydney, NSW, Australia · University of New South Wales +2

  12. Quantifying the Energy Floor: Direct Measurement and Replay Buffer Bias in SAC-Based HVAC Control on sbsim

    Jun 1, 2026Bo Li, Chen ZhangExperience ReplayBuilding Energy Management

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University College of Smart Energy Shanghai, China

  13. PIRS: Physics-Informed Reward Shaping for SAC-Based Building Energy Management

    May 27, 2026Shadmehr Zaregarizi, Khashayar YavariMulti-Objective Reinforcement LearningReward Shaping

    Politecnico di Torino Turin, Italy

  14. A Unified Python Framework for Direct PPO-based Control of AHUs with Economizer Logic and CO2-Constrained Ventilation

    May 23, 2026Erfan Haghighat Damavandi, Davide Papurello, Mahdi Alibeigi +3RL ControlConstrained RL

    a Research and Development Department Owtana Tech- Turin, Italy · b Department of Energy Politecnico di Torino- Turin, Italy · c Department of Energy University of Tehran- Tehran, Iran +1

  15. Counter-Dyna: Data-Efficient RL-Based HVAC Control using Counterfactual Building Models

    May 6, 2026Jan Marco Ruiz de Vargas, Fabian Raisch, Zoltan Nagy +2Neural Surrogate ModelingBuilding Energy Management

    Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany · Technical University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim Rosenheim, Germany · Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven, Netherlands +1

  16. Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Building Heating Control and Demand-side Flexibility

    Apr 17, 2026Colin Jüni, Mina Montazeri, Yi Guo +3RL ControlBuilding Energy Management

    Urban Energy Systems Laboratory, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Dubendorf, Switzerland. · School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Haidian District, Beijing, China · Reliability and Risk Engineering Laboratory, ETH Zürich, CH-8092, Switzerland.

  17. Dual-Loop Control in DCVerse: Advancing Reliable Deployment of AI in Data Centers via Digital Twins

    Apr 8, 2026Qingang Zhang, Yuejun Yan, Guangyu Wu +4RL ControlDigital Twins

    College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore · Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, 311121, China

  18. An Optimal Battery-Free Approach for Emission Reduction by Storing Solar Surplus in Building Thermal Mass

    Mar 30, 2026Michela Boffi, Jessica Leoni, Fabrizio Leonforte +2Building Energy ManagementHeating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Control

    Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, Milano, 20133, Milano, Italy

  19. Experimental study on surveillance video-based indoor occupancy measurement with occupant-centric control

    Mar 27, 2026Irfan Qaisar, Kailai Sun, Qingshan Jia +1Video SurveillanceBuilding Energy Management

    Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems, Department of Automation, BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China · Urban Mobility Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA · Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 138602, Singapore

  20. Agile Reinforcement Learning through Separable Neural Architecture and Applications

    Jan 30, 2026Rajib Mostakim, Reza T. Batley, Sourav SahaRL ControlNeural Network Approximation Theory

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh · Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA

  21. Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Safe Heat Pump Control

    Sep 29, 2024Baohe Zhang, Lilli Frison, Thomas Brox +1RL ControlConstrained RL

    Faculty of Computer Science, University of Freiburg, Germany · Systems Control and Optimization Laboratory, Department of Microsystems Engineering, University of Freiburg, Germany