LuminLab: An AI-Powered Building Retrofit and Energy Modelling Platform

TL;DR

LuminLab is an AI-driven platform that facilitates building retrofit planning by integrating a human-centric chatbot and energy modeling to enable personalized, natural language discussions and decision-making for homeowners.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel online platform combining AI chatbot and energy modeling to streamline building retrofit planning and improve stakeholder communication.

Findings

Enables rapid generation of retrofit plans tailored to user needs

Facilitates natural language discussions for retrofit options

Empowers homeowners to undertake incremental retrofits

Abstract

This paper describes the technical and conceptual development of the LuminLab platform, an online tool that integrates a purpose-fit human-centric AI chatbot and predictive energy model into a streamlined front-end that can rapidly produce and discuss building retrofit plans in natural language. The platform provides users with the ability to engage with a range of possible retrofit pathways tailored to their individual budget and building needs on-demand. Given the complicated and costly nature of building retrofit projects, which rely on a variety of stakeholder groups with differing goals and incentives, we feel that AI-powered tools such as this have the potential to pragmatically de-silo knowledge, improve communication, and empower individual homeowners to undertake incremental retrofit projects that might not happen otherwise.