Feasibility of Artificial Neural Network on Thermal Comfort Research

The possibility of using artificial neural network (ANN), which models the relationship between the thermal environmental factors and the residents' thermal reaction to predict the environmental thermal comfort, is discussed.The ANN models based on BP algorithm were respectively built according to the thermal comfort experiments done under steady and unsteady conditions.The experimental data are used to train and test the model.The test result showed that the ANN model had higher precision in prediction than the traditional method-linear regression under steady condition.And under unsteady condition,the model can also be correctly used to predict the change of the residents' thermal reaction with avoiding dealing with the complicated nonlinear relation while using the regression method.So it is feasible to predict the environmental thermal comfort with building and testing ANN model to different thermal environment.