Machine learning-based energy use prediction for the smart building energy management system

Abstract

Smart building is a building development approach utilizing digital and communication technology to improve occupants' comfort inside the building and help increase energy usage efficiency in building operations. Despite its benefits, the smart building concept is still slowly adopted, particularly in developing countries. The advancement of computational techniques such as machine learning (ML) has helped building owners simulate and optimize various building performances in the building design process more accurately. Therefore, this study aims to assist energy efficiency design strategies in a building by identifying the features of the smart building characteristics that can potentially foster building energy efficiency. Furthermore, an ML model based on the features identified is then developed to predict the level of energy use. K-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm is employed to develop the model with the openly accessible smart building energy usage datasets from Chulalongkorn University Building Energy Management System (CU-BEMS) as the training and testing datasets. The validation result shows that the predictive model has an average relative error value of 17.76%. The energy efficiency levels obtained from applying identified features range from 34.5% to 45.3%, depending on the reviewed floor. This paper also proposed the dashboard interface design for ML-based smart building energy management.