Artificial Intelligence for Improving Thermal Comfort through Envelope Design in Residential Buildings: Recent Developments and Future Directions

Abstract

Envelopes are vital components for improving thermal comfort in almost all building typologies. Yet, the design and analysis of envelopes are complex, as they involve multiple aspects and various parameters, ensuring comfort standards. Improving thermal comfort in residential buildings is within the scope of researchers to suggest sustainable design alternatives that consider multiple performance aspects and design parameters. Previous review articles have focused on improving thermal performance in residential buildings from the perspective of envelope technology, materials, and design strategies. However, none of them investigated current developments using artificial intelligence (AI), which inevitably supports decision-making in complex circumstances for a sustainable built environment. This review examines the contribution of AI methods, which consist of metaheuristic optimization and machine learning algorithms as sub-branches, to envelope parameters. The paper systematically reviews 95 relevant works on AI, including early approaches, to provide a comprehensive overview of current developments, following PRISMA guidelines. The results showed that early applications considered conventional approaches to improve thermal comfort and energy performance, which mostly limit the results to specified cases. On the other hand, studies utilizing AI methods dealt with numerous parameters, allowing them to cope with complex envelope systems in a reasonable amount of time. The study addresses relevant research questions related to the trends, research methods, system types, AI methods, data types, and their relation to performance and envelope parameters. The study also provides actionable insight, underlining gaps and future works for utilizing machine learning methods in the reviewed research domain.