High-resolution weather-guided surrogate modeling for data-efficient cross-location building energy prediction
This addresses the need for scalable and reusable surrogate models in building design optimization, offering a more efficient alternative to physics-based simulations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing weather-informed methods.
The study tackled the problem of location-specific surrogate models for building energy prediction by introducing a high-resolution weather-informed approach that captures short-term weather-energy patterns across regions, resulting in a model that maintains high predictive accuracy for other sites within the same climate zone with no noticeable performance loss and minimal degradation across different zones.
Building design optimization often depends on physics-based simulation tools such as EnergyPlus, which, although accurate, are computationally expensive and slow. Surrogate models provide a faster alternative, yet most are location-specific, and even weather-informed variants require simulations from many sites to generalize to unseen locations. This limitation arises because existing methods do not fully exploit the short-term weather-driven energy patterns shared across regions, restricting their scalability and reusability. This study introduces a high-resolution (weekly) weather-informed surrogate modeling approach that enhances model reusability across locations. By capturing recurring short-term weather-energy demand patterns common to multiple regions, the proposed method produces a generalized surrogate that performs well beyond the training location. Unlike previous weather-informed approaches, it does not require extensive simulations from multiple sites to achieve strong generalization. Experimental results show that when trained on a single location, the model maintains high predictive accuracy for other sites within the same climate zone, with no noticeable performance loss, and exhibits only minimal degradation when applied across different climate zones. These findings demonstrate the potential of climate-informed generalization for developing scalable and reusable surrogate models, supporting more sustainable and optimized building design practices.