LAUSR

Predicating the required building energy when it is in the design stage and before being constructed considers a crucial step for in charge people. Hence, the main aim of this research is to accurately forecast the needed building cooling energy per hour for educational buildings at University of Technology in Iraq. For this purpose, the feed forward artificial neural network (ANN) has been selected as an efficient technique to develop such a predication system.  Firstly, the main building parameters have been investigated and then only the most important ones were chosen to be used as inputs to the ANN model. However, due to the long time period that is required to collect actual consumed building energy in order to be employed for ANN model training, the hourly analysis program (HAP), which is a building simulation software, has been utilized to produce a database covering the summer months in Iraq. Different training algorithms and range of learning rate values have been investigated, and the Bayesian regularization backpropagation training algorithm and 0.05 learning rate were found very suitable for precise cooling energy prediction. To evaluate the performance of the optimized ANN model, mean square error (MSE) and correlation coefficient (R) have been adopted. The MSE and R indices for the predication results proved that the optimized ANN model is having a high predication accuracy with 5.99*10 -6 and 0.9994, respectively.