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Record W4411714535 · doi:10.1016/j.jobe.2025.113341

Transfer learning for cross-building forecasting of building energy and indoor air temperature in model predictive control applications

2025· article· en· W4411714535 on OpenAlex
Hongwen Dou, Kun Zhang

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Building Engineering · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicBuilding Energy and Comfort Optimization
Canadian institutionsÉcole de Technologie Supérieure
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsModel predictive controlArchitectural engineeringBuilding automationModel buildingAir temperaturePredictive modellingEnvironmental scienceIndoor airBuilding scienceBuilding modelComputer scienceControl (management)EngineeringMeteorologySimulationArtificial intelligenceMachine learningGeographyPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

When applying Model Predictive Control (MPC) for Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings, accurate forecasting of short-term energy demand and indoor air condition profiles is essential. However, new or retrofitted buildings lack sufficient operation data to develop precise data-driven models. This study investigates transfer learning techniques to enhance the forecasting performance of black-box models under limited data conditions. Specifically, we leverage synthetic data from an open-source EnergyPlus building model to pre-train three neural network models, which are then transferred to a real building and fine-tuned with limited measurements. The results indicate that incorporating synthetic data into the pre-training phase significantly enhances the forecasting accuracy for building and HVAC energy, as well as indoor air temperature profiles, over a 12-hour horizon with 15-minute intervals. The study underscores the potential of combining transfer learning with synthetic data to address data limitations, extending the applicability of learning-based MPC in real-world buildings.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.603
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.214
Teacher spread0.210 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it