Hybrid approach for energy consumption prediction: Coupling data-driven and physical approaches

Kadir Amasyali, Nora El-Gohary

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In recent years, a large number of building energy consumption prediction models, with various intended uses, have been proposed. The majority of these models have either taken a data-driven or a physical modeling approach, with each approach having its own strengths and limitations. Towards leveraging the strengths and reducing the limitations of each approach for improved prediction performance, this paper presents a hybrid machine-learning approach for occupant-behavior-sensitive energy consumption prediction. The proposed approach is composed of three constituent models: (1) a machine-learning model that learns the impact of outdoor weather conditions from simulation-generated data, (2) a machine-learning model that learns the impact of occupant behavior from real data, and (3) an ensemble model that predicts cooling energy consumption based on the outputs of the first two models. The simulation-generated data were created through simulating a set of reference buildings in EnergyPlus. The real data were collected from an office building in Pennsylvania. The proposed hybrid model was validated on an unseen real dataset. It achieved 0.73 kWh RMSE and 9.07% CV in hourly cooling energy consumption prediction, which indicates that the proposed approach is promising.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number111758
JournalEnergy and Buildings
Volume259
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 15 2022

Keywords

  • Building energy prediction
  • Data-driven approaches
  • EnergyPlus
  • Hybrid approaches
  • Machine learning
  • Occupant behavior
  • Time-series clustering
  • Weather normalization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Civil and Structural Engineering
  • Building and Construction
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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