Energy performance forecasting of residential buildings using fuzzy approaches

The energy consumption used for domestic purposes in Europe is, to a considerable extent, due to heating and cooling. This energy is produced mostly by burning fossil fuels, which has a high negative environmental impact. The characteristics of a building are an important factor to determine the nec...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Nebot Castells, M. Àngela|||0000-0002-4621-8262, Múgica Álvarez, Francisco|||0000-0003-2843-0427
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/176932
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/176932
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app10020720
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Architecture and energy conservation
Intelligent buildings
Fuzzy systems
Energy performance
Heating and cooling load
Fuzzy inductive reasoning
FIR
Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system
ANFIS
Arquitectura i estalvi d'energia
Edificis intel·ligents
Sistemes borrosos
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Aplicacions de la informàtica
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Energies::Eficiència energètica
Descripción
Sumario:The energy consumption used for domestic purposes in Europe is, to a considerable extent, due to heating and cooling. This energy is produced mostly by burning fossil fuels, which has a high negative environmental impact. The characteristics of a building are an important factor to determine the necessities of heating and cooling loads. Therefore, the study of the relevant characteristics of the buildings, regarding the heating and cooling needed to maintain comfortable indoor air conditions, could be very useful in order to design and construct energy-efficient buildings. In previous studies, different machine-learning approaches have been used to predict heating and cooling loads from the set of variables: relative compactness, surface area, wall area, roof area, overall height, orientation, glazing area and glazing area distribution. However, none of these methods are based on fuzzy logic. In this research, we study two fuzzy logic approaches, i.e., fuzzy inductive reasoning (FIR) and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), to deal with the same problem. Fuzzy approaches obtain very good results, outperforming all the methods described in previous studies except one. In this work, we also study the feature selection process of FIR methodology as a pre-processing tool to select the more relevant variables before the use of any predictive modelling methodology. It is proven that FIR feature selection provides interesting insights into the main building variables causally related to heating and cooling loads. This allows better decision making and design strategies, since accurate cooling and heating load estimations and correct identification of parameters that affect building energy demands are of high importance to optimize building designs and equipment specifications.