Prediction of Building’s Thermal Performance Using LSTM and MLP Neural Networks

Accurate prediction of building indoor temperatures and thermal demand is of great help to control and optimize the energy performance of a building. However, building thermal inertia and lag lead to complex nonlinear systems is difficult to model. In this context, the application of artificial neur...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Miguel Martínez Comesaña, Lara Febrero-Garrido, Francisco Troncoso-Pastoriza, Javier Martínez-Torres
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
MLP
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/21/7439
Description
Summary:Accurate prediction of building indoor temperatures and thermal demand is of great help to control and optimize the energy performance of a building. However, building thermal inertia and lag lead to complex nonlinear systems is difficult to model. In this context, the application of artificial neural networks (ANNs) in buildings has grown considerably in recent years. The aim of this work is to study the thermal inertia of a building by developing an innovative methodology using multi-layered perceptron (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. This approach was applied to a public library building located in the north of Spain. A comparison between the prediction errors according to the number of time lags introduced in the models has been carried out. Moreover, the accuracy of the models was measured using the CV(RMSE) as advised by AHSRAE. The main novelty of this work lies in the analysis of the building inertia, through machine learning algorithms, observing the information provided by the input of time lags in the models. The results of the study prove that the best models are those that consider the thermal lag. Errors below 15% for thermal demand and below 2% for indoor temperatures were achieved with the proposed methodology.
ISSN:2076-3417