Greylag Goose Optimization-Driven EALSTM for Accurate HVAC Chiller Energy Prediction
Forecasting the energy consumption of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) chillers is vital for enhancing building efficiency, reducing operating costs, and supporting sustainability goals. However, the task remains challenging due to nonlinear system dynamics, strong dependence on weather conditions, and the scarcity of high-quality real-world datasets. In this work, we employ the Chiller Energy Data from Kaggle, which contains 13,561 cleaned records collected between August 2019 and June 2020, incorporating ten operational and meteorological features. Six baseline models, namely the Evolutionary Attention-based Long Short-Term Memory (EALSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (BILSTM), standard LSTM, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN), are first benchmarked to assess their forecasting capability. To further improve predictive accuracy, we integrate EALSTM with ten meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, focusing on the Greylag Goose Optimization Algorithm (GGO) and comparing it with alternatives such as Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO), Artificial Physics Optimization (APO), Simulated Annealing Optimization (SAO), Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), and others. The optimized GGO+EALSTM framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with a mean squared error of 6.83×10−6 and an R2 value of 0.98, reflecting a 96% reduction in error relative to simple feedforward models and significant improvements over other recurrent networks and optimizer-enhanced variants. The main contributions of this study include a structured benchmarking of neural architectures for chiller forecasting, the first systematic comparison of ten meta-heuristic optimizers applied to deep learning in this domain, and a visualization-based error analysis that strengthens interpretability and supports practical deployment. These results establish optimization-enhanced EALSTM as a robust and generalizable framework for HVAC energy forecasting, paving the way toward more efficient, reliable, and sustainable building energy management.
Volume & Issue
Vol. Volume 21 / Iss. Issue 2