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The building sector contributes significantly to global energy consumption and emission of greenhouse gases. Thermal insulation along with installation of energy-efficient building systems can reduce energy needs while preserving or improving occupant comfort levels. Still sensible control decisions, to harmoniously and effectively operate all building thermal systems, can be used to further improve building energy performance and/or thermal comfort. In this article, a simulation-assisted methodology is presented to automatically generate such decisions. There are two ingredients to our approach: a thermal simulation model-a surrogate of the real building-used to evaluate the effects of potential decisions; and, a cognitive adaptive optimization algorithm used to intelligently search for the "best" control decision. A user-defined cost function is used to compare various decision strategies. Corroborating simulation results are presented to quantify the expected benefits of the proposed approach.

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