Building Energy Prediction Using Artificial Neural Networks (LSTM)

Abstract

Modern buildings account for a significant proportion of global energy consumption worldwide. Therefore, accurate energy use forecast is necessary for energy management and conservation. With the advent of smart sensors, a large amount of accurate energy data is available. Also, with the advancements in data analytics and machine learning, there have been numerous studies on developing data-driven prediction models based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). In this work a type of ANN called Large Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is used to predict the energy use and cooling load of an existing building. A university administrative building was chosen for its typical commercial environment. The network was trained with one year of data and was used to predict the energy consumption and cooling load of the following year. The mean absolute testing error for the energy consumption and the cooling load were 0.105 and 0.05. The percentage mean accuracy was found to be 92.8% and 96.1%. The process was applied to several other buildings in the university and similar results were obtained. This indicates the model can successfully predict the energy consumption and cooling load for the buildings studied. The further improvement and application of this technique for optimizing building performance are also explored.