Prediction of office building electricity demand using artificial neural network by splitting the time horizon for different occupancy rates

Due to the impact of occupants’activities in buildings,the relationship between electricity demand and ambient temperature will show different trends in the long-term and short-term,which show seasonal variation and hourly variation,respectively.This makes it difficult for conventional data fitting methods to accurately predict the long-term and short-term power demand of buildings at the same time.In order to solve this problem,this paper proposes two approaches for fitting and predicting the electricity demand of office buildings.The first proposed approach splits the electricity demand data into fixed time periods,containing working hours and non-working hours,to reduce the impact of occupants’activities.After finding the most sensitive weather variable to non-working hour electricity demand,the building baseload and occupant activities can be predicted separately.The second proposed approach uses the artificial neural network(ANN)and fuzzy logic techniques to fit the building baseload,peak load,and occupancy rate with multi-variables of weather variables.In this approach,the power demand data is split into a narrower time range as no-occupancy hours,full-occupancy hours,and fuzzy hours between them,in which the occupancy rate is varying depending on the time and weather variables.The proposed approaches are verified by the real data from the University of Glasgow as a case study.The simulation results show that,compared with the traditional ANN method,both proposed approaches have less root-mean-square-error(RMSE)in predicting electricity demand.In addition,the proposed working and non-working hour based regression approach reduces the average RMSE by 35%,while the ANN with fuzzy hours based approach reduces the average RMSE by 42%,comparing with the traditional power demand prediction method.In addition,the second proposed approach can provide more information for building energy management,including the predicted baseload,peak load,and occupancy rate,without requiring additional building parameters.

Sensitivity analysis to reduce duplicated features in ANN training for district heat demand prediction

Artificial neural network(ANN)has become an important method to model the nonlinear relationships between weather conditions,building characteristics and its heat demand.Due to the large amount of training data re-quired for ANN training,data reduction and feature selection are important to simplify the training.However,in building heat demand prediction,many weather-related input variables contain duplicated features.This paper develops a sensitivity analysis approach to analyse the correlation between input variables and to detect the variables that have high importance but contain duplicated features.The proposed approach is validated in a case study that predicts the heat demand of a district heating network containing tens of buildings at a university campus.The results show that the proposed approach detected and removed several unnecessary input variables and helped the ANN model to reduce approximately 20%training time compared with the traditional methods while maintaining the prediction accuracy.It indicates that the approach can be applied for analysing large num-ber of input variables to help improving the training efficiency of ANN in district heat demand prediction and other applications.