About
171
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Introduction
Dr. Dong has more than 20 years experiences in smart building system, building energy performance simulation, occupancy behavior modeling, BIM, building controls and FDD. He is also actively involved in the projects related with machine learning for sustainability, wireless sensor network in buildings. Recently, he works on smart communities and cities. He has published more than 120 peer reviewed papers. His papers are cited more than 8,000 times by other researchers around the world.
Additional affiliations
July 2019 - present
January 2013 - June 2019
October 2010 - December 2012
Publications
Publications (171)
Apart from a large energy consumption due to the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) loads in buildings, the contribution of standard equipment in buildings is approximately 17% of the load consumption. Understanding consumption patterns would be important for achieving energy savings in addition to conducting accurate predictions for...
The existing residential building stock plays a significant role in global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Dramatically improving the energy efficiency of residential buildings through retrofits is a crucial step to addressing climate change, offering additional advantages such as improved thermal comfort and healthier indoor envir...
The tremendous energy usage from buildings leads to research studies on their improvement, among which advanced building control plays an important role. In advanced building controls, data-driven predictive control (DDPC), differentiable predictive control (DPC), and reinforcement learning (RL) have shown advantages, but their comparison often lac...
Quasi-bound state in the continuum (QBIC) can effectively enhance the interaction of terahertz (THz) wave with matter due to the tunable high-Q property, which has a strong potential application in the detection of low-concentration biological samples in the THz band. In this paper, a novel THz metamaterial sensor with a double-chain-separated reso...
Buildings are expected to be resilient in the face of future climate change and increasingly frequent disruptive events. Therefore, understanding building performance under various future weather conditions and disrupt events is crucial. However, accessing available data sources is always time-consuming. From this perspective, we developed a data g...
Quasi-bound state in the continuum (QBIC) can effectively enhance the interaction of terahertz (THz) wave with matters due to the tunable high-Q property, which has a strong potential application in detection of low-concentration biological samples in the THz band. In this paper, a novel THz metamaterial sensor with a double-chain separated resonan...
Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) significantly impacts human health, well-being, and productivity. However, a comprehensive and in-depth review of the combined effects of IAQ and other multi-domain factors on human productivity is lacking. There has not been any prior review that encapsulates the impact of multi-domain factors on productivity and...
The office environment's indoor air quality (IAQ) and noise levels are critical factors that affect productivity and overall health. However, a research gap still exists on multi-domain impact of IAQ and noise on human physiological signals. The research aims to establish a comprehensive understanding of the multi-domain impact by analyzing physiol...
A new approach of retrofitting the building envelope and replacing the HVAC system is being implemented nationally to reduce the building sector's burden on the global environment. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the impacts of building retrofitting on energy consumption and occupant behavior in a residential dorm in New York. The stud...
In New York State, more than 750000 homes feature outdated with inefficient HVAC systems. The energy savings potential through occupancy-based ventilation control ranges between 5% to 20%. While commercial buildings frequently use occupancy sensors and smart controls, these devices are rarely installed in residential buildings without building auto...
The rapid development of renewable energy sources brings new challenges for power systems operation, referring to stability and reliability due to its' neutrally intermittent and stochasticity. And improving energy flexibility is crucial for optimizing power system operations, achieving financial benefits, and making effective policies. However, mo...
Buildings use a large amount of energy in the US. It is imperative to optimally manage and coordinate the resources across building and power distribution networks to improve the overall system's efficiency. Optimizing the power grid with discrete variables for energy saving was very challenging for traditional computers and algorithms, as a large...
To meet the standards for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we need to create large-scale solutions for managing smart buildings. Using data-based models instead of physics-based models can make it easier to automatically create and implement these solutions on a large scale. However, it can be difficult to use data-driven control in cities,...
Buildings use about one-third of all the energy produced. Due to inaccurate modeling from building simulation engines, the total annual energy requirement of the building is mostly underestimated. This discrepancy in energy prediction affects the preliminary HVAC sizing, increasing the overall building energy consumption. We measured the energy usa...
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, buildings accounted for more than 40% of the total energy. The need for improving indoor air quality (IAQ) not only during the pandemic but also in the post-pandemic era presents a unique opportunity for innovation that meets the needs in both environmental health and building energy efficiency. Carbon-dioxide concentr...
Buildings consume about 40% of the electricity generated and significantly burden the energy sector. A new concept of net-zero energy building has emerged to ease this burden. The preliminary design relies heavily on the simulation data from building simulation engines like Energy Plus. Research has pointed out about a 30% difference in average bet...
New York State (NYS) has over 750,000 dwelling units with inefficient HVAC and domestic hot water (DHW) supply. To explore the opportunities of carbon neutrality, in this paper, we investigated and evaluated an integrated HVAC and domestic hot water system that could meet all the heating, cooling, ventilation, dehumidification, DHW and air cleaning...
Building model predictive control (MPC) relies on a white- or grey-box model that can require significant time and domain knowledge to develop and calibrate, often on an ad hoc basis. Black-box models can be developed and trained with limited domain knowledge and are easily transferable. In this study, a deep neural network is trained to predict in...
Mycelium-based materials have seen a surge in popularity in the manufacturing industry in recent years. This study aims to build a lab-scale experimental facility to investigate mycelium growth under a well-controlled temperature and humidity environment and explore how substrates of very different chemical and mechanical properties can affect the...
In the United States, the buildings sector consumes about 76% of electricity use and 40% of all primary energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Occupant behavior has drawn increasing research interests due to its impacts on the building energy consumption. However, occupant behavior study at urban scale remains a challenge, and very lim...
Individuals globally spend about 88-92% of their entire time in the indoor environment. The implementation of regularly scheduled systems operation is common in many commercial and residential building types. Occupant Behavior (OB) is highly stochastic, making it difficult to depict the human factor using simple schedules. In the present work, wind...
Window operation significantly impacts energy use and indoor environmental quality in buildings. Individuals behave differently, making it difficult for models trained on a specific dataset to encompass the entire spectrum of these actions. As a result, a generalizable model that is capable of predicting the behavior of diverse occupants is necessa...
To contain the spread of COVID-19 in buildings, the HVAC systems were required to operate with a higher outdoor air flow rate for a sufficient time, which caused a sharp increase in building energy consumption. Consequently, finding a high-energy efficiency ventilation control strategy is critical while maintaining a low infection risk. In this stu...
People spend more than 90% of their time in buildings. The highly stochastic behavior of occupants can alter the pollutants concentration in an indoor space. Many studies have reiterated that window opening is one of the best methods to reduce indoor pollutant concentration. In this study, we analyzed the influence of window opening behavior on ind...
As people spend 90% of their time indoors, it was necessary to improve indoor environmental quality to enhance human productivity. Indoor environmental quality consists of indoor air quality (IAQ), thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort. However, only a few studies have investigated the combined effects of IAQ and noise. During and after the COVID-1...
Test room experiments allow to study human-building interactions under controlled environmental boundaries. Differences in experimental design, methods, and contextual variables specific to the location and test room features, result in experimental outcomes that are difficult to generalize and compare. This paper presents an international Round Ro...
The residential energy demand timing and magnitude are highly impacted by occupants' behaviors and activities. However, acquiring a reliable data source for these activities is a vital challenge, especially on an urban scale. In this context, this paper presents a stochastic bottom-up model for generating electrical loads for residential buildings...
Occupant-Centric Control and Operation (OCC) represents a transformative approach to building management, integrating sensing of indoor environmental quality, occupant presence, and occupant-building interactions. These data are then utilized to optimize both operational efficiency and occupant comfort. This paper summarizes the findings from the I...
As people spend 90% of their time indoors, it was necessary to improve indoor environmental quality to enhance human productivity. Indoor environmental quality consists of indoor air quality (IAQ), thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort. However, only a few studies have investigated the combined effects of IAQ and noise. During and after the COVID-1...
Energy flexibility, through short-term demand-side management (DSM) and energy storage technologies, is now seen as a major key to balancing the fluctuating supply in different energy grids with the energy demand of buildings. This is especially important when considering the intermittent nature of ever-growing renewable energy production, as well...
During the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, governments around the world have formulated policies requiring ventilation systems to operate at a higher outdoor fresh air flow rate for a sufficient time, which has led to a sharp increase in building energy consumption. Therefore, it is necessary to identify an energy-efficient ventilation strategy to...
Buildings contribute to more than 70% of overall U.S. electricity usage and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
HVAC systems in buildings often consume more than 40% of the total building energy usage. To reduce such high
energy use, numerous control strategies including optimal and predictive controls have been developed and
demonstrated. To achieve a...
Buildings consume more than 70% of electricity in the U.S. In order to reduce building energy consumption, advanced building controls have been developed. However, most building controls are using physics-based models and lack of scalability. Recent development of data-driven control models could overcome this challenge and be automatically develop...
Weather forecasting has been a critical component to predict and control building energy consumption for better building energy management. Without accessibility to other data sources, the onsite observed temperatures or the airport temperatures are used in forecast models. In this paper, we present a novel approach by utilizing the crowdsourcing w...
People spend about 87-92% of their overall time of day in some form of indoor environment. It is also well established that buildings consume about 40% of the total electricity generated. Studies have shown that operating windows during HVAC use can increase the heating and cooling load. Until now, fixed window opening and closing schedules have be...
New York State has over 750,000 residential units with inefficient HVAC and domestic hot water supplies. The potential for energy saving through occupancy control of ventilation and hot water system varies from 5% to 20%. In this study, we investigated the energy saving of occupancy control for an integrated air and domestic hot water system that c...
Energy flexibility, through short-term demand-side management (DSM) and energy storage technologies, is now seen as a major key to balancing the fluctuating supply in different energy grids with the energy demand of buildings. This is especially important when considering the intermittent nature of ever-growing renewable energy production, as well...
Building energy flexibility is crucial for improving the local consumption of renewable energy and enhancing building self-sufficiency. The abundant solar energy resource in the tropics presents a great opportunity to reduce carbon emission and achieve net-zero, but the building energy flexibility remains understudied in the region. Hence, this stu...
Since the coronavirus disease 2019, the extended time indoors makes people more concerned about indoor air quality, while the increased ventilation in seeks of reducing infection probability has increased the energy usage from heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems. In this study, to represent the dynamics of indoor temperature and air...
Respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 can be spread through airborne transmission, which is highly dependent on the airflow pattern of the studied room. Indoor air is typically not perfectly mixed even using a mixing ventilation, especially in large spaces. Airflow patterns in large open spaces such as hotel banquet rooms and open plan offices, are...
Buildings consume about 40% of the electricity generated and significantly burden the energy sector. A new concept of net-zero energy building has emerged to ease this burden. The preliminary design relies heavily on the simulation data from building simulation engines like Energy Plus. Research has pointed out about a 30% difference in average bet...
New York State (NYS) has over 750,000 dwelling units with inefficient HVAC and domestic hot water (DHW) supply. To explore the opportunities of carbon neutrality, in this paper, we investigated and evaluated an integrated HVAC and domestic hot water system that could meet all the heating, cooling, ventilation, dehumidification, DHW and air cleaning...
The number of occupancy and occupant behaviour models developed for building performance simulation (BPS) has steadily increased for the past four decades. However, their use is still limited in practice. This is partly due to the difficulty in understanding their utility and to the challenges related to their implementation into BPS. Both problems...
This paper introduces a database of 34 field-measured building occupant behavior datasets collected from 15 countries and 39 institutions across 10 climatic zones covering various building types in both commercial and residential sectors. This is a comprehensive global database about building occupant behavior. The database includes occupancy patte...
The availability of computational power, and a wealth of data from sensors have boosted the development of model-based predictive control for smart and effective control of advanced buildings in the last decade. More recently occupant-behavior models have been developed for including people in the building control loops. However, while important ob...
Energy-related behaviors of occupants constitute a key factor influencing building performance; accordingly, the measured occupant data can support the objective assessment of the indoor environment and energy performance of buildings, which can inform building design and operational decisions. Existing data schemas focus on metadata of sensors, me...
Low-income households face long-standing challenges of energy insecurity and inequality (EII). During extreme events (e.g., disasters and pandemics) these challenges are especially severe for vulnerable populations reliant on energy for health, education, and well-being. However, many EII studies rarely incorporate the micro- and macro-perspectives...
Building sensing technologies have evolved rapidly in the last two decades in aid of monitoring building environment and energy system performance. A series of occupancy sensing systems were developed to track the occupant behavior in the indoor space. Occupancy-based building system control is defined as a control method that adjusts the building...
The recognition of the determinant role of occupants in building energy consumption has catalyzed the increasing research activities on occupancy-centric controls (OCCs) for building operations. This paper evaluates the monetary savings of the occupancy-centric heating, ventilation, and airconditioning (HVAC) controls in four types of commercial bu...
Occupants are the core of the built environment. Traditional heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems operate with predefined schedules and maximum occupancy assumptions with no consideration of specific occupant information. These generalized assumptions usually do not align with the actual demand and result in over-conditioning a...
This paper presents a nationwide simulation study to investigate the HVAC energy savings potential of occupancy sensors and occupant-centric controls (OCCs) in large hotel buildings. Three simulation scenarios were defined to reflect the different levels of occupancy sensing capabilities. Multiple zone-level and system-level occupant-centric HVAC c...
![Fig. 5. The Fitzpatric skin type scale [76].](profile/Meng-Kong/publication/356464195/figure/fig5/AS:1098627460149248@1638944606146/The-Fitzpatric-skin-type-scale-76_Q320.jpg)
Occupancy-based control (OBC) in smart buildings provides numerous potentials to improve building energy efficiency. To achieve effective OBC, the occupancy status of a space or a building needs to be well understood in terms of whether the space is occupied and how many people are in the space. Well-designed and selected people counting technologi...
Occupant behavior is identified as one of the key factors influencing the energy use and indoor environmental quality of the building. Occupancy-centric control is famous for its potential to save building energy without sacrificing occupants’ comfort. This study utilized two identical lab spaces, configured as typical open-plan offices, to investi...
Occupants’ comfort perception affects building energy consumptions. To improve the understanding of human comfort, which is crucial to reduce energy demand, laboratory experiments with humans in controlled environments (test rooms) are fundamental, but their potential also depends on the characteristic of each research facility. Nowadays, there is...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused millions of deaths and great economic loss globally. There has been substantial evidence supporting the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Airborne route has been considered as a major transmission pathway, which can spread the disease over a longer distance and time. The viral loads in the respiratory tract of a...
This paper presents an efficient data-driven building electricity management system that integrates a battery energy storage (BES) and photovoltaic panels to support decision-making capabilities. In this micro-grid (MG) system, solar panels and power grid supply the electricity to the building and the BES acts as a buffer to alleviate the uncertain...
Indoor environment construction for occupants has high energy consumption; as such, occupancy plays a noteworthy role in the complete life cycle phase of buildings, including design, operation, and retrofitting. In the past few years, building occupancy, which is considered the basis of occupant behavior, has attracted increasing attention from res...
Traditional occupant behavior modeling has been studied at the building level, and it has become an important factor in the investigation of building energy consumption. However, studies modeling occupant behaviors at the urban scale are still limited. Recent work has revealed that urban big data can enable occupant behavior modeling at the urban s...
Building sensing technologies have evolved rapidly in the last two decades in aid of monitoring building environment and energy system performance. A series of occupancy sensing systems were developed to track the occupant behavior in the indoor space. Occupancy-based building system control is defined as a control method that adjusts the building...
Building sensing technologies have evolved rapidly in the last two decades in aid of monitoring building environment and energy system performance. A series of occupancy sensing systems were developed to track the occupant behavior in the indoor space. Occupancy-based building system control is defined as a control method that adjusts the building...
The unprecedented coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has made more than 125 million people infected and more than 2.7 million people dead globally. Airborne transmission has been recognized as one of the major transmission routes for SARS-CoV-2. This paper presents...
Recent studies demonstrated that there is significant energy-saving potential for primary schools, which heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems with occupant-centric control (OCC) is an excellent candidate to save energy. However, such an energy impact has yet to be evaluated for different climate zones as well as different energ...
Electricity demand for building-related activities is steadily increasing due to urbanization. Combined with the increasing penetration of renewable energy, this trend brings new challenges to distribution network operators in maintaining nodal voltage and minimizing active power losses. At the same time, building operators require more effective m...
Advanced building controls and energy optimization for new constructions and retrofits rely on accurate weather data. Traditionally, most studies utilize airport weather information as the decision inputs. However, most buildings are in environments that are quite different than those at the airport miles away. Tree cover, adjacent buildings, and m...
Thermostat management plays a significant role in household energy conservation. This study aims to conduct a systematic and comprehensive analysis to quantify the energy savings potential of the occupant-centric smart thermostat based on a large-scale nationwide simulation infrastructure. The single-family Residential Prototype Building Model was...
The occupant-centric control (OCC) is receiving an increasing attention since it could reduce building heating ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system energy consumptions while not affecting the occupant thermal comfort. This paper aims to quantify the nationwide energy-saving potential of implementing the occupant-centric HVAC controls in t...
In the US, people spend more than 90% of their time in buildings, which contributes to more than 70% of overall electricity usage in the country. Occupant behavior is becoming a leading factor impacting energy consumption in buildings. Existing occupant-behavior studies are often limited to a single building and individual behavior, such as presenc...
Airborne transmission has been recognized as a major transmission pathway for the infectious disease COVID-19. This study investigated the effectiveness of several indoor air quality (IAQ) control strategies on the mitigation of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The well-known airborne disease infection risk model...
The proliferation of urban sensing, IoT, and big data in cities provides unprecedented opportunities for a deeper understanding of occupant behaviour and energy usage patterns at the urban scale. This enables data-driven building and energy models to capture the urban dynamics, specifically the intrinsic occupant and energy use behavioural profiles...
Despite the fact that buildings are designed for occupants in principle, evidence suggests buildings are often uncomfortable compared to the requirements of standards; difficult to control by occupants; and, operated inefficiently with regards to occupants’ preferences and presence. Meanwhile, practitioners –architects, engineers, technology compan...
Many new tools for improving the design and operation of buildings try to realize the potential of big data. In particular, data is an important element for occupant-centric design and operation as occupants’ presence and actions are affected by a high degree of uncertainty and, hence, are hard to model in general. For such research, data handling...
The heating ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system is a major contributor to building energy consumption. In this paper, the energy savings potential of implementing occupant centric control (OCC) for HVAC systems in office buildings is quantified on a nationwide basis. Firstly, the medium-sized office from the DOE Commercial Prototype Buil...
Short-term load forecasting (STLF) is used by building operators to make informed decisions about electricity usage and purchase. Recently, research has investigated the potential of ensemble learning for improving forecast accuracy with researchers often to combine several of the same type of learning machines into an ensemble. In this paper, a no...
With rapid urbanization and climate change, the demand for cooling in Chinese urban residential buildings is creating a great challenge for the energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction targets of China. However, there is lack of information to track the changes in cooling patterns of Chinese urban households and little research to reveal fac...
The heating ventilation and airconditioning (HVAC) system is a major contributor to building energy consumption. This paper aims to quantify the nationwide energy savings potential of implementing occupancy-based control (OBC) for HVAC systems in typical medium-sized office buildings using the EnergyPlus whole building simulation program. First, th...
This paper reviews the system components, modeling, and control of microgrids for future smart buildings in current literature. Microgrids are increasingly widely studied due to their reliability in the event of grid failure or emergency, their incorporation of renewable energy sources, and the potential they represent for overall cost reduction fo...
This paper aims to provide a systemic review of how indoor sensors influence in managing optimal energy saving, thermal comfort, visual comfort, and indoor air quality in the built environment. The optimal management of energy saving and occupant comfort plays a vital role in the built environment because the occupant's productivity and health are...
With the acceleration of global warming and energy shortages, the smart grid has become the goal of power grid development,whichmakesintelligenthouseholdappliancecontrolsystemsessential.Topromotetheintegration of traditional household appliances into a new electrical system, this study focused on an appliance recognition algorithm applicable to tra...
This chapter provides a technical overview of occupant-centric sensing and control as well as supporting data collection and modeling approaches. Though occupant-centric controls can extend across HVAC, lighting, and plug loads, this chapter focuses primarily on HVAC-related controls in buildings with automatic building management systems (BMS), wh...
Aggregated control of electrical loads in a large cluster of buildings has been a challenge due to the complexity of the system involving generators, grid constraints, load serving entities complex load models, and people behavior. This paper introduces a novel load aggregation method in an electricity distribution system with Model Predictive Cont...
The developments in sensing modalities and computing platforms enable many new sensing technologies and data sources for monitoring occupant presence and actions. The wealth of data opens new opportunities for extracting knowledge through data-driven modeling of occupant presence and actions. In particular, the many opportunities with machine learn...
With big thermal storage capacity and controllable loads such as the heating ventilation and air conditioning systems, buildings have great potential in providing demand response services to the smart grid. However, uncoordinated energy management of a large number of buildings in a distribution feeder can push power distribution systems into the e...
People spend more than 90% of their life time in buildings, which makes occupant behavior one of the leading influences of energy consumption in buildings. Occupancy and occupant behavior, which refer to human presence inside buildings and their active interactions with various building system such as lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation, window...
