New Advanced Technology Methods for Energy Efficiency of Buildings

Energy consumed by buildings represents a large part of the world's total energy consumption with a total share of 40%. This is the reason why energy efficiency of buildings has become a very important scientific field. For the purpose of this paper a critical review of old and new methods of controlling the parts of a building's automation and thus achieving energy savings are compared, analyzed and presented. The method of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) and its significant impact on the improvement of the management of a building is being presented. FCMs is a new soft computing method which combine neural networks and Fuzzy Logic. They have been used with very promising results in many fields such as medicine, transportation, manufacturing agriculture, food industry and energy. In this paper the use of FCMs is exploited and specifically used in issues of energy efficiency of buildings. Obtained results, simulation and experimental, for case studies where FCMs were used in buildings, of residential and commercial use, in Southern Greece will be presented. Software tools based on the aforementioned applications will be briefly presented. In the near future these tools are going to be integrated in even more buildings thus giving us real data which can and will be used in future research for moving from high energy consumption to Net-Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB).