Sustainable Building Design: A Challenge at the Intersection of Machine Learning and Design Optimization

Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for about 40% of primary energy consumption in the United States, hence improving their energy efficiency could have important sustainability benefits. The design of a building has tremendous effect on its energy profile, and recently there has been an increased interest in developing optimization methods that support the design of high performance buildings. Previous approaches are either based on simulation optimization or on training an accurate predictive model that is queried during the optimization. We propose a method that more tightly integrates the machine learning and optimization components, by employing active learning during optimization. In particular, we use a Gaussian Process (GP) model for the prediction and active learning and multiobjective genetic algorithm NSGA-II for the optimization. We develop a comprehensive and publicly available benchmark for building design optimization. We evaluate 5 machine learning approaches on our dataset, and show that the GP model is competitive, in addition to being well-suited for the active learning setting. We compare our optimization approach against the 2-stage approach and simulation optimization. Our results show that our approach produces solutions at the Pareto frontier compared to the other two approaches, while using only a fraction of the simulations and time.