BuilDyn: Excitation-Driven Data Generation for Building Thermal Dynamics Modeling and Control
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used for data-driven modeling of buildings to enable downstream tasks such as fault detection and diagnosis, and energy-efficient control. While recent work improves generalization across building characteristics, weather, and occupancy, generalization also depends on sufficient exploration of the control-driven system state space. Existing real-world datasets and simulation environments predominantly reflect stationary operation under fixed control policies, resulting in limited excitation and reduced robustness to unseen operating conditions. This paper introduces BuilDyn, a package based on BuilDa that enables customizable excitation strategies for control-oriented data generation. BuilDyn further supports sampling from representative building distributions and provides a Python interface for easy integration into machine learning pipelines. We demonstrate the benefits of BuilDyn by comparing the performance of data-driven ML models trained on non-excited and excited data for one building. With BuilDyn, we hope to advance scalable control-oriented modeling and support future directions such as transfer learning and building-specific foundation models.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.29849,
title = {BuilDyn: Excitation-Driven Data Generation for Building Thermal Dynamics Modeling and Control},
author = {Felix Koch and Thomas Krug and Fabian Raisch and Benjamin Schäfer and Benjamin Tischler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29849},
year = {2026}
}