Ensuring liveability and comfort is one of the fundamental objectives of urban planning. Numerous studies have employed computational methods to assess and quantify factors related to urban comfort such as greenery coverage, thermal comfort, and walkability. However, a clear definition of urban comfort and its comprehensive evaluation framework remain elusive. Our research explores the theoretical interpretations and methodologies for assessing urban comfort within digital planning, emphasising three key dimensions: multidimensional analysis, data support, and AI assistance.

In response to the substantial energy consumption in buildings, the Japanese government initiated the BI-Tech (Behavioral Insights X Technology) project in 2019, aimed at promoting voluntary energy-saving behaviors through the utilization of AI and IoT technologies. Our study aimed at small and medium-sized office buildings introduces a cost-effective IoT-based BI-Tech system, utilizing the Raspberry Pi 4B+ platform for real-time monitoring of indoor thermal conditions and air conditioner (AC) set-point temperature. Employing machine learning and image recognition, the system analyzes data to calculate the PMV index and predict energy consumption changes due to temperature adjustments. The integration of mobile and desktop applications conveys this information to users, encouraging energy-efficient behavior modifications. The machine learning model achieved with an R2 value of 97%, demonstrating the system's efficiency in promoting energy-saving habits among users.

Thermal comfort is essential for well-being in urban spaces, especially as cities face increasing heat from urbanization and climate change. Existing thermal comfort models usually overlook temporal dynamics alongside spatial dependencies. We address this problem by introducing a spatio-temporal jump model that clusters data with persistence across both spatial and temporal dimensions. This framework enhances interpretability, minimizes abrupt state changes, and easily handles missing data. We validate our approach through extensive simulations, demonstrating its accuracy in recovering the true underlying partition. When applied to hourly environmental data gathered from a set of weather stations located across the city of Singapore, our proposal identifies meaningful thermal comfort regimes, demonstrating its effectiveness in dynamic urban settings and suitability for real-world monitoring. The comparison of these regimes with feedback on thermal preference indicates the potential of an unsupervised approach to avoid extensive surveys.

Model predictive control (MPC) has been shown to significantly improve the energy efficiency of buildings while maintaining thermal comfort. Data-driven approaches based on neural networks have been proposed to facilitate system modelling. However, such approaches are generally nonconvex and result in computationally intractable optimization problems. In this work, we design a readily implementable energy management method for small commercial buildings. We then leverage our approach to formulate a real-time demand bidding strategy. We propose a data-driven and mixed-integer convex MPC which is solved via derivative-free optimization given a limited computational time of 5 minutes to respect operational constraints. We consider rooftop unit heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems with discrete controls to accurately model the operation of most commercial buildings. Our approach uses an input convex recurrent neural network to model the thermal dynamics. We apply our approach in several demand response (DR) settings, including a demand bidding, a time-of-use, and a critical peak rebate program. Controller performance is evaluated on a state-of-the-art building simulation. The proposed approach improves thermal comfort while reducing energy consumption and cost through DR participation, when compared to other data-driven approaches or a set-point controller.

With more than 32% of the global energy used by commercial and residential buildings, there is an urgent need to revisit traditional approaches to Building Energy Management (BEM). With HVAC systems accounting for about 40% of the total energy cost in the commercial sector, we propose a low-complexity DRL-based model with multi-input multi-output architecture for the HVAC energy optimization of open-plan offices, which uses only a handful of controllable and accessible factors. The efficacy of our solution is evaluated through extensive analysis of the overall energy consumption and thermal comfort levels compared to a baseline system based on the existing HVAC schedule in a real building. This comparison shows that our method achieves 37% savings in energy consumption with minimum violation (<1%) of the desired temperature range during work hours. It takes only a total of 40 minutes for 5 epochs (about 7.75 minutes per epoch) to train a network with superior performance and covering diverse conditions for its low-complexity architecture; therefore, it easily adapts to changes in the building setups, weather conditions, occupancy rate, etc. Moreover, by enforcing smoothness on the control strategy, we suppress the frequent and unpleasant on/off transitions on HVAC units to avoid occupant discomfort and potential damage to the system. The generalizability of our model is verified by applying it to different building models and under various weather conditions.

Residential consumers can use the demand response program (DRP) if they can utilize the home energy management system (HEMS), which reduces consumer costs by automatically adjusting air conditioning (AC) setpoints and shifting some appliances to off-peak hours. If HEMS knows occupancy status, consumers can gain more economic benefits and thermal comfort. However, for the building occupancy status, direct sensing is costly, inaccurate, and intrusive for residents. So, forecasting algorithms could serve as an effective alternative. The goal of this study is to present a non-intrusive, accurate, and cost-effective approach, to develop a multi-objective simulation model for the application of DRPs in a smart residential house, where (a) electrical load demand reduction, (b) adjustment in thermal comfort (AC) temperature setpoints, and (c) , worst cases scenario approach is very conservative. Because that is unlikely all uncertain parameters take their worst values at all times. So, the flexible robust counterpart optimization along with uncertainty budgets is developed to consider uncertainty realistically. Simulated results indicate that considering uncertainty increases the costs by 36 percent and decreases the AC temperature setpoints. Besides, using DRPs reduces demand by shifting some appliance operations to off-peak hours and lowers costs by 13.2 percent.

The large amount of data collected in buildings makes energy management smarter and more energy efficient. This study proposes a design and implementation methodology of data-driven heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) control. Building thermodynamics is modeled using a symbolic regression model (SRM) built from the collected data. Additionally, an HVAC system model is also developed with a data-driven approach. A model predictive control (MPC) based HVAC scheduling is formulated with the developed models to minimize energy consumption and peak power demand and maximize thermal comfort. The performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated in the workspace in the actual campus building. The HVAC system using the proposed framework reduces the peak power by 16.1\% compared to the widely used thermostat controller.

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication in the IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI) on 7 January 2022. Abstract--The artificial intelligence (AI) system designer for thermal comfort faces insufficient data recorded from the current user or overfitting due to unreliable training data. This work introduces the reliable data set for training the AI subsystem for thermal comfort. This paper presents the control algorithm based on shallow supervised learning, which is simple enough to be implemented in the Internet of Things (IoT) system for residential usage using ASHRAE RP-884 and ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort Database II. No training data for thermal comfort is available as reliable as this dataset, but the direct use of this data can lead to overfitting. This work offers the algorithm for data filtering and semantic data augmentation for the ASHRAE database for the supervised learning process. Overfitting always becomes a problem due to the psychological aspect involved in the thermal comfort decision. The method to check the AI system based on the psychrometric chart against overfitting is presented. This paper also assesses the most important parameters needed to achieve human thermal comfort. This method can support the development of reinforced learning for thermal comfort. HE decarbonising heat and buildings has become one heat pump is not a drop-in replacement for gas-boilers [5]. The UK is committed to If the heat pump is installed in poorly performed or leaky reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 [1]. The support includes buildings, the efficiency will decrease.

In this paper, we take a holistic approach to deal with the tradeoffs between energy use and comfort in commercial buildings. We developed a system called OCTOPUS, which employs a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that uses a data-driven approach to find the optimal control sequences of all building's subsystems, including HVAC, lighting, blind and window systems. The DRL architecture includes a novel reward function that allows the framework to explore the tradeoffs between energy use and users' comfort, while at the same time enabling the solution of the high-dimensional control problem due to the interactions of four different building subsystems. In order to cope with OCTOPUS's data training requirements, we argue that calibrated simulations that match the target building operational points are the vehicle to generate enough data to be able to train our DRL framework to find the control solution for the target building. In our work, we trained OCTOPUS with 10-year weather data and a building model that is implemented in the EnergyPlus building simulator, which was calibrated using data from a real production building. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that OCTOPUS can achieve 14.26% and 8.1% energy savings compared with the state-of-the-art rule-based method in a LEED Gold Certified building and the latest DRL-based method available in the literature respectively, while maintaining human comfort within a desired range.

We introduce Cohort Comfort Models, a new framework for predicting how new occupants would perceive their thermal environment. Cohort Comfort Models leverage historical data collected from a sample population, who have some underlying preference similarity, to predict thermal preference responses of new occupants. Our framework is capable of exploiting available background information such as physical characteristics and one-time on-boarding surveys (satisfaction with life scale, highly sensitive person scale, the Big Five personality traits) from the new occupant as well as physiological and environmental sensor measurements paired with thermal preference responses. We implemented our framework in two publicly available datasets containing longitudinal data from 55 people, comprising more than 6,000 individual thermal comfort surveys. We observed that, a Cohort Comfort Model that uses background information provided very little change in thermal preference prediction performance but uses none historical data. On the other hand, for half and one third of each dataset occupant population, using Cohort Comfort Models, with less historical data from target occupants, Cohort Comfort Models increased their thermal preference prediction by 8~\% and 5~\% on average, and up to 36~\% and 46~\% for some occupants, when compared to general-purpose models trained on the whole population of occupants. The framework is presented in a data and site agnostic manner, with its different components easily tailored to the data availability of the occupants and the buildings. Cohort Comfort Models can be an important step towards personalization without the need of developing a personalized model for each new occupant.