Comparative analysis of artificial intelligence models for real-time and future forecasting of environmental conditions: A wood-frame historic building case study

Precise environmental monitoring within historic buildings is crucial for ensuring optimal conditions that guarantee the proper preservation of these structures, thereby maintaining their integrity and cultural legacy. Moreover, outdoor environmental conditions can potentially impact the indoor environment, especially in historic structures with deficient insulation materials and damaged envelopes. As climate change points to more recurrent and severe extreme climatic events in the coming years, a current and future comprehensive evaluation of indoor microclimate in historic structures is essential. This study investigated the utilization of machine learning and deep learning algorithms for real-time and future forecasting of the indoor microclimate, including air temperature, relative humidity, and dew point, in a historic building located in San Antonio, Texas, USA. In situ monitored data from April 2022 to January 2023 were used to train different predictive algorithms. The results indicated that Multi-Layer Perceptrons and Support Vector Machine models yielded the most accurate values in terms of real-time forecasting of the indoor microclimate, while Extreme Gradient Boosting model excelled in convergence time. Additionally, Long Short-Term Memory models were the most accurate in predicting indoor microclimate using future weather data for the current century, specifically for 2050 and 2080. The methodology developed in this study can be applied to different construction types and locations globally. As it enables the prediction of environmental conditions crucial for historic preservation, the results have the potential to assist experts in making informed decisions about conserving historic structures, both now and in the future. • Assessment of the use of ML and DL algorithms for indoor microclimate forecasting • Support Vector Machine achieves the highest accuracy in real-time predictions • XGBoost and LSTM fail to predict significant drops in environmental conditions • LSTM yields the highest accuracy for environmental forecasting in 2050 and 2080 • The methodology is used to determine the performance index of a historic building