Innovative, Scalable Modeling Solutions for Sustainable and Resilient Buildings

Abstract 
Buildings have excellent energy-saving and power optimization potential. They are critical shelters for people during climate disasters with increasing intensity, frequency, and duration. Thus, an essential and urgent research topic is improving buildings' sustainability and resilience at various geographical scales. Modeling is an efficient way to address fundamental research questions for this research topic. However, modeling a building is challenging since it is a complex cyber-physical system. When a study is conducted at a large geographic scale, modeling becomes interdisciplinary and needs deep collaborations with various domain experts. To conquer these challenges, this talk will introduce innovative, scalable modeling solutions for sustainable and resilient buildings. Dr. Ye will summarize his past and current related research, which integrate building science, construction engineering, systems and controls, modeling and computational techniques, and artificial intelligence. His research goal is to fill the gap between proof-of-concept research and practical applications toward multi-scale sustainable and resilient buildings. Examples will introduce the innovations and challenges of modeling to solve real-world problems of multi-scale sustainable and resilient buildings. 

Biography  

Dr. Yunyang Ye is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama. He was a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tongji University, Shanghai, China, and his doctoral degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on sustainable and resilient buildings, sustainable and smart cities, and grid-interactive efficient buildings. His research spans from the system level to the urban scale, using system modeling methods that hybridize physics-based and cutting-edge artificial intelligence approaches. His spatial-temporary research is interdisciplinary and involves occupant behaviors (social), power systems, transportation (engineering), and climate disasters (science), which provides the nature to conduct broad collaborations. He has led multiple projects and tasks sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and ASHRAE, and published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. He is a youth editor for Building Simulation: An International Journal. He has also served as a guest editor for six special issues, a scientific committee member to organize two international conferences, and the vice chair for ASHRAE Technical Committee 7.4. He has received multiple awards, including the ASHRAE New Investigator Award, the IBPSA-USA Emerging Contributor Award, and the ASHRAE Homer Addams Award.