Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Energy and Thermal Comfort Control for Sustainable Buildings: An Extended Representation of the Systematic Review
It addresses the problem of creating sustainable and comfortable indoor spaces for building occupants, but is incremental as it synthesizes existing research rather than presenting new methods.
This systematic review examined 120 studies on AI-based control strategies for balancing thermal comfort and energy efficiency in buildings, highlighting their potential to optimize indoor environments.
Different factors such as thermal comfort, humidity, air quality, and noise have significant combined effects on the acceptability and quality of the activities performed by the building occupants who spend most of their times indoors. Among the factors cited, thermal comfort, which contributes to the human well-being because of its connection with the thermoregulation of the human body. Therefore, the creation of thermally comfortable and energy efficient environments is of great importance in the design of the buildings and hence the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. Recent works have been directed towards more advanced control strategies, based mainly on artificial intelligence which has the ability to imitate human behavior. This systematic literature review aims to provide an overview of the intelligent control strategies inside building and to investigate their ability to balance thermal comfort and energy efficiency optimization in indoor environments. Methods. A systematic literature review examined the peer-reviewed research works using ACM Digital Library, Scopus, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore (IEOL), Web of Science, and Science Direct (SDOL), besides other sources from manual search. With the following string terms: thermal comfort, comfort temperature, preferred temperature, intelligent control, advanced control, artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, building, indoors, and built environment. Inclusion criteria were: English, studies monitoring, mainly, human thermal comfort in buildings and energy efficiency simultaneously based on control strategies using the intelligent approaches. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines were used. Initially, 1,077 articles were yielded, and 120 ultimately met inclusion criteria and were reviewed.