High-resolution weather-guided surrogate modeling for data-efficient cross-location building energy prediction

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-resolution, weather-informed surrogate modeling approach that captures short-term weather-energy patterns, enabling accurate and scalable building energy predictions across multiple locations without extensive site-specific simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel weather-informed surrogate model that generalizes across locations by leveraging recurring short-term weather-energy demand patterns, reducing the need for multi-site training.

Findings

High predictive accuracy across multiple sites within the same climate zone.

Minimal performance degradation when applied across different climate zones.

Supports scalable and reusable building energy prediction models.

Abstract

Building design optimization often depends on physics-based simulation tools such as EnergyPlus, which, although accurate, are computationally expensive and slow. Surrogate models provide a faster alternative, yet most are location-specific, and even weather-informed variants require simulations from many sites to generalize to unseen locations. This limitation arises because existing methods do not fully exploit the short-term weather-driven energy patterns shared across regions, restricting their scalability and reusability. This study introduces a high-resolution (weekly) weather-informed surrogate modeling approach that enhances model reusability across locations. By capturing recurring short-term weather-energy demand patterns common to multiple regions, the proposed method produces a generalized surrogate that performs well beyond the training location. Unlike previous weather-informed approaches, it does not require extensive simulations from multiple sites to achieve strong generalization. Experimental results show that when trained on a single location, the model maintains high predictive accuracy for other sites within the same climate zone, with no noticeable performance loss, and exhibits only minimal degradation when applied across different climate zones. These findings demonstrate the potential of climate-informed generalization for developing scalable and reusable surrogate models, supporting more sustainable and optimized building design practices.