In the current technological era, energy-efficient buildings have a significant research body due to increasing concerns about energy consumption and its environmental impact. Designing an appropriate energy-efficient building depends on its layout, such as relative compactness, overall area, height, orientation, and distribution of the glazing area. These factors directly influence the cooling load (CL) and heating load (HL) of residential buildings. An accurate prediction of these load facilitates a better management of energy consumption and enhances the living standards of inhabitants. Most of the traditional machine learning (ML)-based approaches are designed for single-output (SO) prediction, which is a tedious task due to separate training processes for each output with low performance. In addition, these approaches have a high level of nonlinearity between input and output, which need more enhancement in terms of robustness, predictability, and generalization. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel framework based on gated recurrent unit (GRU) that reliably predicts the CL and HL concurrently. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a multi-output (MO) sequential learning model followed by utility preprocessing under the umbrella of a unified framework. A comprehensive set of ablation studies on ML and deep learning (DL) techniques is done over an energy efficiency dataset, where the proposed model reveals an incredible performance as compared to other existing models.
Keywords: GRU; cooling load; energy consumption; energy efficient building; heating load.