Agentic AI-Enabled Framework for Thermal Comfort and Building Energy Assessment in Tropical Urban Neighborhoods
For urban planners and building designers, this framework offers a novel tool to quickly evaluate climate-resilient strategies, though it is domain-specific and incremental in nature.
This study proposes an agentic AI framework combining LLMs with lightweight physics-based models to assess thermal comfort and building energy in tropical urban neighborhoods, enabling rapid evaluation of strategies like green façades and cool paints.
In response to the urban heat island effects and building energy demands in Singapore, this study proposes an agentic AI-enabled reasoning framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with lightweight physics-based models. Through prompt customization, the LLMs interpret urban design tasks, extract relevant policies, and activate appropriate physics-based models for evaluation, forming a closed-loop reasoning-action process. These lightweight physics-based models leverage core thermal and airflow principles, streamlining conventional models to reduce computational time while predicting microclimate variables, such as building surface temperature, ground radiant heat, and airflow conditions, thereby enabling the estimation of thermal comfort indices, e.g., physiological equivalent temperature (PET), and building energy usage. This framework allows users to explore a variety of climate-resilient building surface strategies, e.g., green façades and cool paint applications, that improve thermal comfort while reducing wall heat gain and energy demand. By combining the autonomous reasoning capacity of LLMs with the rapid quantitative evaluation of lightweight physics-based models, the proposed system demonstrates potential for cross-disciplinary applications in sustainable urban design, indoor-outdoor environmental integration, and climate adaptation planning. The source code and data used in this study are available at: https://github.com/PgUpDn/urban-cooling-agent.