About Us +
Researchers in the Building Technology & Urban Systems Division (BTUS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory develop data and technologies that increase energy efficiency and improve the health, safety and comfort of building occupants, in the United States and worldwide.

We work closely with industry partners, academics and government officials to achieve these goals, and share our research widely
Research +
We are at the forefront of cutting-edge research that redefines building technology and explores all areas of urban systems.

We have been leaders for decades in developing energy-efficient windows, improving indoor air quality, coming up with new ideas to fix the nation's electricity grid, and so much more.

Visit our research areas at the right to find out more.
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Publications +
Enjoy presentations from Building Technology & Urban systems research experts on a wide variety of topics in the areas of building energy efficiency, the electricity grid and how it relates to buildings and much more.
- Presentations
News
Tools & Guides +
Explore our tools, guidebooks and software and download for free.

We offer a variety of technologies designed to simulate and model real-world circumstances to assist in energy-saving programs and help building owners build better buildings. These tools can help calculate performance of building systems like windows and shades, help consumers and builders pick the best windows for a variety of applications and much more.

Publications

Publications By Research Area

2025

Pereira, Flavia deAndrade, Kyriakos Katsigarakis, Dimitrios Rovas, Marco Pritoni, Conor Shaw, Lazlo Paul, Anand Prakash, Susana Martin-Toral, Donal Finn, and James O’Donnell."A semantics-driven framework to enable demand flexibility control applications in real buildings."Advanced Engineering Informatics 64 (2025) 103049. DOI

Paul, Lazlo, Flavia De Andrade Pereira, Anand Prakash, Sang woo Ham, Jingjuan Feng, Rich Brown, and Marco Pritoni."Open building operating system: a grid-responsive semantics-driven control platform for buildings."Science and Technology for the Built Environment 31.3 (2025) 294-311. DOI

2024

Casillas, Armando, Thomas Defauw, Sang woo Ham, Dre Helmns, Lazlo Paul, Anand Prakash, Weiping Huang, Peter Grant, and Marco Pritoni."Demystifying Thermal Energy Storage Integrated Heat Pump Systems: Development of Generalized Sizing and Control Algorithms for Demand Flexibility."ACEEE Summer Study (2024).

Ham, Sang woo, Lazlo Paul, Armando Casillas, Anand Prakash, Donghun Kim, Richard E Brown, Marco Pritoni, and Peter Grant."Practical challenges of model predictive control (MPC) for grid interactive small and medium commercial buildings."ACEEE Summer Study (2024).

Pereira, Flavia De Andrade, Lazlo Paul, Marco Pritoni, Armando Casillas, Anand Prakash, Weiping Huang, Conor Shaw, Susana Martin-Toral, Donal Finn, and James O’ Donnell."Enabling portable demand flexibility control applications in virtual and real buildings."Journal of Building Engineering 86 (2024) 108645. DOI

Nordman, Bruce, Margarita Kloss, Bijit Kundu, Nate Dewart, Anand Prakash, Laura Wong, Alanna Torres, Rachel Levine, Marco Pritoni, Jordan Shackelford, Heidi Werner, Rahul Athalye, Aditya Khandekar, Callie Clark, Chris Uraine, and Rebecca Aviles."Energy Reporting: Device Demonstration, Communication Protocols, and Codes and Standards." (2024).

Mulayim, Ozan Baris, Lazlo Paul, Marco Pritoni, Anand Prakash, Malavikha Sudarshan, and Gabe Fierro."Large Language Models for the Creation and Use of Semantic Ontologies in Buildings: Requirements and Challenges."Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (2024) 312-317. DOI

Prakash, Anand, Flavia deAndrade Pereira, Mario Bergés, Marco Pritoni, and Burcu Akinci."Ontologies at Work: Analyzing Information Requirements for Model Predictive Control in Buildings."Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (2024) 214-218. DOI

Grant, Peter, Tzu-Ching Su, Luis L Fernandes, Jordan Shackelford, Anand Prakash, Stephen Czarnecki, Pei-Yu Yu, and Feng-Yi Lin."OpenFacadeControl: enabling integration of automated facades with other building systems." (2024). DOI

2023

Roa, Carlos Duarte, Paul Raftery, Anand Prakash, and Therese Peffer."Field Demonstration of the Brick Ontology to Scale up the Deployment of ASHRAE Guideline 36 Control Sequences."ASHRAE Annual Conference 2023 (2023). DOI

Sartori, Igor, Harald Taxt Walnum, Kristian S Skeie, Laurent Georges, Michael D Knudsen, Peder Bacher, José Candanedo, Anna-Maria Sigounis, Anand Prakash, Marco Pritoni, Jessica Granderson, Shiyu Yang, and Man Pun Wan."Sub-hourly measurement datasets from 6 real buildings: Energy use and indoor climate."Data in Brief 48 (2023) 109149. DOI

Granderson, Jessica, Samuel Fernandes, and Anand Prakash."Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Image Dataset of the Built Environment for 3D reconstruction (UAVID3D)." (2023). DOI

Peffer, Therese, Gabe Fierro, Paul Raftery, Carlos Duarte Roa, Marco Pritoni, Michael Wetter, Anand Prakash, Lazlo Paul, and Erik Paulson."Skewering the silos: using Brick to enable portable analytics, modeling and controls in buildings."Center for the Built Environment (2023).

2022

Zhang, Kun, Anand Prakash, Lazlo Paul, David Blum, Peter Alstone, James Zoellick, Richard E Brown, and Marco Pritoni."Model predictive control for demand flexibility: Real-world operation of a commercial building with photovoltaic and battery systems."Advances in Applied Energy 7 (2022) 100099. DOI

Prakash, Anand, Marco Pritoni, Margarita Kloss, Mary Ann Piette, Michel Kamel, and Dotty Hage."Cloud-Control of Legacy Building Automation System: A case study."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Nordman, Bruce, Marco Pritoni, Mary Ann Piette, and Anand Prakash."Communication Requirements for Price-Based Grid Coordination."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Helmns, Dre, Armando Casillas, Anand Prakash, David Blum, Marco Pritoni, Spencer M Dutton, Jonathan Woolley, and Subhrajit Chakraborty."Heat Pumps with Phase Change Thermal Storage: Flexible, Efficient, and Electrification Friendly."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Singh, Reshma, Samuel Fernandes, Anand Prakash, Paul A Mathew, Jessica Granderson, Colman Snaith, Rahul Pusapati, Prakash Jadhav, Avideh Zakhor, Rishi Upadhyay, Ozgur Gonen, and Harry Bergmann."Scaling Building Energy Audits through Machine Learning Methods on Novel Drone Image Data."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Paul, Lazlo, Anand Prakash, Kun Zhang, Marco Pritoni, and Richard E Brown."SolarPlus Optimizer: Integrated Control of Solar, Batteries, and Flexible Loads for Small Commercial Buildings."2022 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022).

Roa, Carlos Duarte, Paul Raftery, Ruiji Sun, Lazlo Paul, Anand Prakash, Marco Pritoni, Gabe Fierro, and Therese Peffer."Towards a Stronger Foundation: Digitizing Commercial Buildings with Brick to Enable Portable Advanced Applications."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Wetter, Michael, Paul Ehrlich, Antoine Gautier, Milica Grahovac, Philip Haves, Jianjun Hu, Anand Prakash, Dave Robin, and Kun Zhang."OpenBuildingControl: Digitizing the control delivery from building energy modeling to specification, implementation and formal verification."Energy 238 (2022) 121501. DOI

2021

Touzani, Samir, Anand Prakash, Zhe Wang, Shreya Agarwal, Marco Pritoni, Mariam Kiran, Richard E Brown, and Jessica Granderson."Controlling distributed energy resources via deep reinforcement learning for load flexibility and energy efficiency."Applied Energy (2021). DOI

Bennani, Imane Lahmam, Anand Prakash, Marina Zafiris, Lazlo Paul, Carlos Duarte Roa, Paul Raftery, Marco Pritoni, and Gabe Fierro."Query relaxation for portable brick-based applications."BuildSys '21: The 8th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (2021). DOI

Wetter, Michael, Jianjun Hu, Anand Prakash, Paul Ehrlich, Gabe Fierro, Milica Grahovac, Marco Pritoni, Lisa Rivalin, and Dave Robin."Modelica-json: Transforming energy models to digitize the control delivery process."IBPSA Building Simulation Conference 2021 (2021).

Helmns, Dre, David Blum, Armando Casillas, Anand Prakash, Jonathan Woolley, David Vernon, Caton Mande, Michael Woodcox, and Spencer M Dutton."Towards a Techno-Economic Analysis of PCM-Integrated Hybrid HVAC Systems."6th International High Performance Buildings Conference at Purdue (2021).