Balancing Sustainability and Comfort: A Holistic Study of Building Control Strategies That Meet the Global Standards for Efficiency and Thermal Comfort

Abstract

The objective of energy transition is to convert the worldwide energy sector from using fossil fuels to using sources that do not emit carbon by the end of the current century. In order to achieve sustainability in the construction of energy-positive buildings, it is crucial to employ novel approaches to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Hence, it is essential to develop buildings with very efficient structures to promote sustainable energy practices and minimize the environmental impact. Our aims were to shed some light on the standards, building modeling strategies, and recent advances regarding the methods of control utilized in the building sector and to pinpoint the areas for improvement in the methods of control in buildings in hopes of giving future scholars a clearer understanding of the issues that need to be addressed. Accordingly, we focused on recent works that handle methods of control in buildings, which we filtered based on their approaches and relevance to the subject at hand. Furthermore, we ran a critical analysis of the reviewed works. Our work proves that model predictive control (MPC) is the most commonly used among other methods in combination with AI. However, it still faces some challenges, especially regarding its complexity.