Estimating Spatio-Temporal Building Power Consumption Based on Graph Convolution Network Method

Buildings are responsible for around 30% and 42% of the consumed energy at the global and European levels, respectively. Accurate building power consumption estimation is crucial for resource saving. This research investigates the combination of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) to analyze power building consumption, thereby focusing on predictive modeling. Specifically, by structuring graphs based on Pearson’s correlation and Euclidean distance methods, GCNs are employed to discern intricate spatial dependencies, and LSTM is used for temporal dependencies. The proposed models are applied to data from a multistory, multizone educational building, and they are then compared with baseline machine learning, deep learning, and statistical models. The performance of all models is evaluated using metrics such as the mean absolute error (MAE), mean squared error (MSE), R-squared (R2), and the coefficient of variation of the root mean squared error (CV(RMSE)). Among the proposed computation models, one of the Euclidean-based models consistently achieved the lowest MAE and MSE values, thus indicating superior prediction accuracy. The suggested methods seem promising and highlight the effectiveness of GCNs in improving accuracy and reliability in predicting power consumption. The results could be useful in the planning of building energy policies by engineers, as well as in the evaluation of the energy management of structures.