Simulations in agricultural buildings: a machine learning approach to forecast seasonal energy need

A fast and reliable estimation of building energy need is essential in agricultural building design, nonetheless, a large number of simulations is required to obtain better energy saving solutions. The aim of this work is to understand if machine learning can substitute numerical simulations and speed up the building design process and assess the incidence of specific architectural elements. Supervised regression models has been trained and tested in a data-set of thousands simulations performed on a case-study agricultural building. Among the algorithms, the tree-based Extreme Gradient Boosting showed the best performance. A study on model explainability has been carried out using SHAP and features importance, which is fundamental to help academics and professionals devise better design strategies for both new constructions and retrofitting interventions.