Papers for
building design teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
LLM agent optimizes building energy system costs efficiently
AutoEnergyDesign: An LLM-Driven Agent for Automatic Energy System Design Optimization
Abstract: Designing building energy systems is a high-dimensional, mixed-integer search problem: when each design is evaluated by a year-long simulation, black-box optimizers typically need hundreds of evaluations. This paper presents AutoEnergyDesign, a framework in which a Large Language Model (LLM) agent reasons over previous simulation results, proposes configuration changes and learns in context from each outcome, while a git-based mechanism automatically reverts unsuccessful changes. The agent couples a reasoning model with an explicit memory organisation (procedural, semantic, episodic and reflective), a constrained action interface and an environment-grounded keep/revert signal. The simulator covers eight technologies (photovoltaics, micro-wind, combined heat and power, solar thermal, gas boilers, batteries, heat pumps and inverters) and computes the 25-year Net Present Cost (NPC), including capital and operating costs and salvage value. On a case study with measured building load profiles, the agent, run with Claude Haiku 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 (ten runs of 50 simulations each), is compared with random search, Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) Bayesian optimization and a $(1+1)$ evolution strategy sharing the agent's acceptance rule (300 evaluations, ten seeds). With all three models the agent reaches an NPC of about 3.53 MEUR, 1.20% below the best TPE result and 0.23% below the best evolution-strategy result. It comes within 1% of this design after a median of 18 (Opus) to 27.5 (Haiku) simulations, whereas among the baselines only the evolution strategy does so, in half of its seeds and after a median of 192 evaluations. Opus reaches the best design in all ten runs, Sonnet in six (two runs never come within 1%), and Haiku comes within 1% in every run but reaches it exactly only once. Every decision is recorded in an auditable trace.
Cleaned residential floor plan dataset supports building analysis and machine learning
ModRes: A modification of the ResPlan dataset ready for floor plan analysis and graph machine learning
Abstract: Floor plan datasets underpin computational analysis of building layouts, spatial connectivity and graph machine learning. However, publicly available datasets often require substantial preprocessing before they can be used reliably. We present ModRes, a cleaned and enriched version of the ResPlan dataset, containing 8,431 valid and unique residential floor plans. Invalid and duplicate floor plans are removed through a dedicated cleaning workflow, producing a ready-to-use dataset. For each floor plan, ModRes provides two-dimensional geometry, images, three-dimensional building representations and three complementary dual graphs in CSV and JSON formats with graph-, node- and edge-level features. Continuous and categorical graph attributes support machine learning workflows. We characterise the dataset using graph-based statistics and demonstrate its utility through a range of case studies. ModRes provides structured geometric, topological and semantic representations needed to automate spatial analysis and support machine learning-based workflows for building design and performance evaluation.