Combining artificial intelligence and building engineering technologies towards energy efficiency: the case of ventilated façades

Purpose Nearly 75% of EU buildings are not energy-efficient enough to meet the international climate goals, which triggers the need to develop sustainable construction techniques with high degree of resilience against climate change. In this context, a promising construction technique is represented by ventilated façades (VFs). This paper aims to propose three different VFs and the authors define a novel machine learning-based approach to evaluate and predict their energy performance under different boundary conditions, without the need for expensive on-site experimentations Design/methodology/approach The approach is based on the use of machine learning algorithms for the evaluation of different VF configurations and allows for the prediction of the temperatures in the cavities and of the heat fluxes. The authors trained different regression algorithms and obtained low prediction errors, in particular for temperatures. The authors used such models to simulate the thermo-physical behavior of the VFs and determined the most energy-efficient design variant. Findings The authors found that regression trees allow for an accurate simulation of the thermal behavior of VFs. The authors also studied feature weights to determine the most relevant thermo-physical parameters. Finally, the authors determined the best design variant and the optimal air velocity in the cavity. Originality/value This study is unique in four main aspects: the thermo-dynamic analysis is performed under different thermal masses, positions of the cavity and geometries; the VFs are mated with a controlled ventilation system, used to parametrize the thermodynamic behavior under stepwise variations of the air inflow; temperatures and heat fluxes are predicted through machine learning models; the best configuration is determined through simulations, with no onerous in situ experimentations needed.