Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Systems Toward Zero-Emission Buildings: A Systematic Review of Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are among the largest energy consumers in buildings, making their intelligent operation fundamental to achieving zero-emission performance and advancing climate neutrality. With recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI), new opportunities have emerged to optimize HVAC operations by enabling predictive, adaptive, and autonomous control. Several studies have explored aspects of AI-driven net-zero emission performance for building HVAC systems. However, a systematic assessment that consolidates these findings and identifies future directions is still needed. This review addresses this gap by analyzing the current state of research on AI-enabled HVAC systems in the context of zero-emission building performance, with particular attention to residential, commercial, and educational settings. In addition, it provides recommendations for future research while underscoring the importance of AI methods in achieving zero-emission performance of building HVAC systems. Based on this review, five primary application domains of AI-enabled building HVAC systems were identified and analyzed: predictive maintenance, scheduling, adaptive optimization, renewable energy integration, and IoT-enabled control. Existing research gaps are identified, including privacy-preserving AI methods, modular and interoperable frameworks, climate-adaptive and occupant-aware strategies, and computationally efficient architectures. Future directions in the field of the AI-enabled HVAC system integrations, along with lifecycle assessment, are highlighted to enable resilient, zero-emission building performance.