HVAC-COOLING TOWER ENERGY CONSUMPTION PREDICTION IN COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS USING ADVANCED NEURAL NETWORK FRAMEWORKS
Abstract
Today, a major area of concern is the huge consumption of energy worldwide. The modern buildings are considered the largest energy consumers. When the energy consumption pattern of buildings is analyzed, attention is diverted towards the “Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning” plant, which is accountable for the maximum consumption of energy in the buildings. This research work proposes a Deep learning framework including variants of Artificial Neural Network (ANN), namely, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to analyze and predict the abnormal energy consumption of the HVAC plants in commercial buildings. Also, proficient pre-processing, exploratory data analysis, and hyperparameter tuning for the proposed models are the key factors of this research. The proposed models have exhibited significant improvement as compared to the original RNN, LSTM, and GRU models. Different models of GRU were created using different values for hyperparameters, and the results of the experiments performed on the dataset show that one of the models of GRU outperformed the others with the least Mean Squared Errors (0.006) and (0.005) for the two months April and August, respectively. The research reveals that GRU is a better option for time series data analysis and is useful in energy consumption prediction for HVAC plants.
Downloads
References
M. W. Ahmad, M. Mourshed, and Y. Rezgui, “TREES VS NEURONS: COMPARISON BETWEEN RANDOM FOREST AND ANN FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION PREDICTION OF BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION,” Energy Build., vol. 147, pp. 77–89, Jul. 2017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2017.04.038.
J. S. Chou and D. K. Bui, “MODELING HEATING AND COOLING LOADS BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR ENERGY-EFFICIENT BUILDING DESIGN,” Energy and Buildings, vol. 82, pp. 437–446, Oct. 2014. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2014.07.036.
M. Goyal and M. Pandey, “EXTREME GRADIENT BOOSTING ALGORITHM FOR ENERGY OPTIMIZATION IN BUILDINGS PERTAINING TO HVAC PLANTS,” AI Endorsed Trans Energy Web, vol. 8, no. 31, p. e1, May 2020. doi: https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.13-7-2018.164562.
M. S. Al-Homoud, “COMPUTER-AIDED BUILDING ENERGY ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES,” Build. Environ., vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 421–433, May 2001. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0360-1323(00)00026-3.
P. Carreira, A. A. Costa, V. Mansur, and A. Arsénio, “CAN HVAC REALLY LEARN FROM USERS? A SIMULATION-BASED STUDY ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF VOTING FOR COMFORT AND ENERGY USE OPTIMIZATION,” Sustainable Cities and Society, vol. 41, pp. 275-285, Aug. 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210670717312301. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2018.05.043.
D. B. Crawley, J. W. Hand, M. Kummert, and B. T. Griffith, “CONTRASTING THE CAPABILITIES OF BUILDING ENERGY PERFORMANCE SIMULATION PROGRAMS,” Build. Environ., vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 661–673, Apr. 2008. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2006.10.027.
H. Zhao, F. Magoulès, “A REVIEW ON THE PREDICTION OF BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 3586-3592, Aug. 2012. Accessed: Dec. 15, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032112001438
A. Hoffman, “PEAK DEMAND CONTROL IN COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS WITH TARGET PEAK ADJUSTMENT BASED ON LOAD FORECASTING,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Control Applications, Trieste, Italy, 1998, pp. 1294-1299. Accessed: Dec. 15, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/721669/
Z. Wang, T. Hong, M. A. Piette, “PREDICTING PLUG LOADS WITH OCCUPANT COUNT DATA THROUGH A DEEP LEARNING APPROACH,” Energy, vol. 179, pp. 757-771, Jul. 2019. Accessed: Dec. 15, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219310205
B. Yegnanarayana, ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS. 2009. Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=RTtvUVU_xL4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=B.+Yegnanarayana,+Artificial+neural+networks,+PHI+Learning+Pvt.+Ltd.,+2009&ots=Gec1DmzEQv&sig=4pjuOvoJalGA46wrcC7o4vT_0d8
K. Priddy and P. Keller, ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS: AN INTRODUCTION. 2005. Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=BrnHR7esWmkC&oi=fnd&pg=PP13&dq=K.+L.+Priddy+and+P.+E.+Keller,+Artificial+neural+networks:+an+introduction,+Vol.+68,+SPIE+press,+2005&ots=UA4y_n6yRQ&sig=Xg0QkH4DiHbgJkpkC88tTqgssTI
A. Shenfield, D. Day, A. Ayesh, “INTELLIGENT INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEMS USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS,” ICT Express, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 95-99, Jun. 2018. Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405959518300493
K. Mehrotra, C. Mohan, and S. Ranka, ELEMENTS OF ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS. 1997. Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6d68Y4Wq_R4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=K.+Mehrotra,+C.K.+Mohan+and+S.+Ranka,+Elements+of+artificial+neural+networks,+MIT+press,+1997&ots=6uD9X2BZy9&sig=R6wL5BCV5Lr8GlFkrsT6I5fHU_w
M. Chen, U. Challita, W. Saad, and M. Debbah, “ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS-BASED MACHINE LEARNING FOR WIRELESS NETWORKS: A TUTORIAL,” IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 3039-3071, Fourthquarter 2019 Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8755300/
M. Hassoun, FUNDAMENTALS OF ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS. 1995. Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Otk32Y3QkxQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=M.+H.+Hassoun,+Fundamentals+of+artificial+neural+networks,+MIT+press,+1995&ots=de5TjHxdS7&sig=v7G1YKtN0qgxpE6eqvjUP_R2AFI
L. Sehovac, C. Nesen, “FORECASTING BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION WITH DEEP LEARNING: A SEQUENCE TO SEQUENCE APPROACH,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Congr. Internet Things (ICIOT), Milan, Italy, 2019, pp. 108-116, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8815666/. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIOT.2019.00029.
A. Graves, “LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORY,” in Supervised Sequence Labelling with Recurrent Neural Networks, pp. 37–45, Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2012. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24797-2_4.
M. Wöllmer et al., “NOISE ROBUST ASR IN REVERBERATED MULTISOURCE ENVIRONMENTS APPLYING CONVOLUTIVE NMF AND LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORYComputer Speech & Language, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 745-760, May 2013. Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885230812000393.
S. Hochreiter and J. Schmidhuber, “LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORY,” Neural Computation, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 1735-1780, Nov. 1997, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6795963/. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735.
R. Dey and F. M. Salem, “GATE-VARIANTS OF GATED RECURRENT UNIT (GRU) NEURAL NETWORKS,” in Proc. IEEE 60th Int. Midwest Symp. Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), Boston, MA, USA, 2017, pp. 1597-1600, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8053243/. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/MWSCAS.2017.8053243.
M. Goyal and M. Pandey, “TOWARDS PREDICTION OF ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF HVAC PLANTS USING MACHINE LEARNING,” in Recent Developments in Science, Engineering and Technology, CCIS, vol. 1229, pp. 254-265, Singapore: Springer, 2020. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5827-6_22.
S. Singaravel, J. Suykensand, and P. Geyer, “DEEP-LEARNING NEURAL-NETWORK ARCHITECTURES AND METHODS: USING COMPONENT-BASED MODELS IN BUILDING-DESIGN ENERGY PREDICTION,” Advanced Engineering Informatics, vol. 38, pp. 81-90, Oct. 2018, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1474034617305359
A. Tsanas and A. Xifara, “ACCURATE QUANTITATIVE ESTIMATION OF ENERGY PERFORMANCE OF RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS USING STATISTICAL MACHINE LEARNING TOOLS,” Energy and Buildings, vol. 49, pp. 560-567, Jun. 2012, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877881200151X
X. Wei, A. Kusiak, M. Li, F. Tang, and Y. Zeng, “MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION OF THE HVAC (HEATING, VENTILATION, AND AIR CONDITIONING) SYSTEM PERFORMANCE,” Energy, vol. 83, pp. 294-306, Apr. 2015, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544215001796
D. Bui, T. Nguyen, T. Ngo, and H. Nguyen-Xuan, “AN ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK (ANN) EXPERT SYSTEM ENHANCED WITH THE ELECTROMAGNETISM-BASED FIREFLY ALGORITHM (EFA) FOR PREDICTING THE ENERGY CONSUMPTION IN BUILDINGS,” Energy, vol. 190, p. 116370, Jan. 2020, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219320651. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2019.116370
D. Araya et al., “AN ENSEMBLE LEARNING FRAMEWORK FOR ANOMALY DETECTION IN BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION,” Energy and Buildings, vol. 144, pp. 191-206, Jun. 2017, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778817306904
C. Fan, F. Xiao, and S. Wang, “DEVELOPMENT OF PREDICTION MODELS FOR NEXT-DAY BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND PEAK POWER DEMAND USING DATA MINING TECHNIQUES,” Applied Energy, vol. 127, pp. 1-10, Aug. 2014, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261914003596
J. S Chou and D. K. Bui, “MODELING HEATING AND COOLING LOADS BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR ENERGY-EFFICIENT BUILDING DESIGN, Energy and Buildings, vol. 82, pp. 437-446, Oct. 2014, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877881400574X
M. Ahmad, M. Mourshed, and Y. Rezgui, “TREES VS NEURONS: COMPARISON BETWEEN RANDOM FOREST AND ANN FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION PREDICTION OF BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION,” Energy and Buildings, vol. 147, pp. 77-89, Jul. 2017, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778816313937
H. Naganathan, W. Chong, X. Chen, “BUILDING ENERGY MODELING (BEM) USING CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS AND SEMI-SUPERVISED MACHINE LEARNING APPROACHES,” Automation in Construction, vol. 72, pp. 187-194, Dec. 2016, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0926580516301595
Y. Peng, A. Rysanek, Z. Nagy and A. Schlüter, “USING MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES FOR OCCUPANCY-PREDICTION-BASED COOLING CONTROL IN OFFICE BUILDINGS,” Applied energy, vol. 211, pp. 1343-1358, Feb. 2018, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261917317129
M. Ravanelli, P. Brakel, M. Omolgo, and Y. Bengio, “LIGHT GATED RECURRENT UNITS FOR SPEECH RECOGNITION,” IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 92-102, Apr. 2018. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/TETCI.2017.2762739
M. Sajjad et al.,“A NOVEL CNN-GRU-BASED HYBRID APPROACH FOR SHORT-TERM RESIDENTIAL LOAD FORECASTING,” IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 143759-143768, 2020, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9141253/. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3009537
J. Runge and R. Zmeureanu, “A REVIEW OF DEEP LEARNING TECHNIQUES FOR FORECASTING ENERGY USE IN BUILDINGS,” Energies, vol. 14, no. 3, Art. no. 608, 2021, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/3/608. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/en14030608
C. Fan, Y. Sun, Y. Zhao, M. Song, and J. Wang, “DEEP LEARNING-BASED FEATURE ENGINEERING METHODS FOR IMPROVED BUILDING ENERGY PREDICTION,” Applied Energy, vol. 240, pp. 35-45, Apr. 2019, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261919303496
A. Almalaq and J. J. Zhang, “EVOLUTIONARY DEEP LEARNING-BASED ENERGY CONSUMPTION PREDICTION FOR BUILDINGS”, IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 1520-1531, 2019, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8579122/
C. Li, Z. Ding, D. Zhao, J. Yi, and G. Zhang, “BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION PREDICTION: AN EXTREME DEEP LEARNING APPROACH,” Energies, vol. 10, no. 10, Art. no. 1525, 2017, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/10/1525. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/en10101525
S. Singaravel, J. Suykens, and P. Geyer, “DEEP-LEARNING NEURAL-NETWORK ARCHITECTURES AND METHODS: USING COMPONENT-BASED MODELS IN BUILDING-DESIGN ENERGY PREDICTION,” Advanced Engineering Informatics, vol. 38, pp. 81-90, Oct. 2018, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1474034617305359
E. Mocanu, P. Nguyen, M. Gibescu, and W. L. Kling, “DEEP LEARNING FOR ESTIMATING BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION,” Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks, vol. 6, pp. 91-99, Jun. 2016, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352467716000163
A. Das, M. Annaqeeb, E. Azar, V. Novakovic, and M. B. Kjærgaard, “OCCUPANT-CENTRIC MISCELLANEOUS ELECTRIC LOADS PREDICTION IN BUILDINGS USING STATE-OF-THE-ART DEEP LEARNING METHODS,” Applied Energy, vol. 269, p. 115135, Jul. 2020, Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920306474. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.115135
C. Zhang et al., “A HYBRID DEEP LEARNING-BASED METHOD FOR SHORT-TERM BUILDING ENERGY LOAD PREDICTION COMBINED WITH AN INTERPRETATION PROCESS,” ,Energy and Buildings, vol. 225, p. 110301, Oct. 2020 Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778820309324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2020.110301
Copyright (c) 2026 Mrinal Pandey, Monika Goyal, Mamta Arora

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this Journal agree to the following terms:
- Author retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a creative commons attribution license that allow others to share the work within an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication of this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangement for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g. acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal).
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their websites) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published works.




1.gif)


