The Influence of Over-Ventilation and Occupant Behavior on Energy Consumption in Smart Buildings

Dear Colleagues,

Buildings account for a considerable portion of global energy consumption and GHG emissions. Smart buildings aim to reduce building energy demand, especially wasted energy due to ad hoc occupant behavior or avoidable baseloads. In the past few years, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new layer of complexity has been added to building energy performance: health and safety measures, such as social distancing between employees, increased outdoor air intake, and increased fan operating schedules, which led to increased energy demand in many cases. This Special Issue aims to shed light on smart building energy performance and find innovative methods to reduce the energy as well as carbon footprints of buildings, while ensuring that the new health and safety measures are met. New strategies for controlling building energy demand while meeting the minimum indoor air quality by applying smart controls and/or alternative energy sources constitute a very promising approach. This Special Issue plans to provide an overview of the most recent advances in the field of smart building energy performance. This Special Issue aims to provide selected contributions on advances in building energy data analytics, building envelope characterization, and applications of machine learning in load forecasting and classification.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Implications of COVID-19 and other potential ad hoc shutdowns on building energy performance;
• Building peak load shifting;
• Occupant behavior;
• Climate-resilient buildings;
• Building thermal storage;
• Building electrochemical storage;
• Demand response;
• Building-integrated renewable energy.

Dr. Hadia Awad
Dr. Araz Ashouri
Guest Editors

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