Urban/Building Energy Modeling and Smart Management
Energy Modeling is fundamental to support a diverse spectrum of applications, including sustainable building design, building carbon management, building resilience assessment etc. Smart energy management further empowers the intelligence of built environment towards sustainability and resilience. We are researching to develop (1) building energy models with improved accuracy and computational efficiency in both individual building and urban scale, and (2) smart urban energy system (buildings, electrical vehicles, central energy plants) management strategies.
Artificial Intelligence in Built Environment
The booming of sensing and computing techniques opens up the opportunities to empower built environment with improved sustainability, resilience, and human-centric service. We are endeavoring to develop advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithms and sensing techniques to realize intelligent built environment in the future. Through AI, smart buildings become interconnected ecosystems that foster sustainability, resilience, comfort and health, ultimately redefining the way we interact with and experience the built environment.
Renewable Energy Integration with Buildings and EVs
The adoption of renewable energy as clean energy sources is rapidly increasing these years to displace conventional power plants in energy supply. The intermittent nature of renewable energy resources raises new challenges in power system management. Buildings and electric vehicles (EVs) constitute the most important sectors of energy use. Leveraging the energy use flexibility of buildings and EVs in the demand side is of significance to maintain supply-demand balance and achieve efficient power system operation.
Human Behavior Modeling and Analysis
Human drives the operation of our society. The built environment is established to serve human needs in comfort, health, and mobility, which are driven by various physical and psychological factors, hence stochastic and heterogeneous by nature. The research group has developed (1) computing models to simulate human behaviors related to both indoor energy use and mobility, and (2) physical experiments in our thermal chambers to investigate occupant thermal comfort.