Abstract
Studies have shown that the actual energy consumption of buildings once built and in operation is often far greater than the energy consumption predictions made during design-leading to the term "performance gap." An alternative to traditional, building physics based, prediction methods is an approach based on real-world data, where behavior is learned through observations. Display energy certificates are a source of observed building "behavior" in the United Kingdom, and machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, can predict global behavior in complex systems, such as buildings. In view of this, artificial neural networks, a machine learning technique, were trained to predict annual thermal (gas) and electrical energy use of building designs, based on a range of collected design and briefing parameters. As a demonstrative case, the research focused on school design in England. Mean absolute percentage errors of 22.9% and 22.5% for annual thermal and electrical energy use predictions, respectively, were achieved. This is an improvement of 9.1% for the prediction of annual thermal energy use and 24.5% for the prediction of annual electrical energy use when compared to sources evidencing the current performance gap.