Elie Azar

Elie Azar
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Elie verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Elie verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Carleton University · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

PhD

About

142
Publications
29,543
Reads
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3,705
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2019 - May 2022
Khalifa University
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
July 2014 - July 2019
Khalifa University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
January 2010 - May 2014
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Position
  • Research Assistant
Education
May 2011 - May 2014
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Field of study
  • Civil and Environmental Engineering
January 2010 - May 2011
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Field of study
  • Civil and Environmental Engineering
August 2006 - May 2008
Polytechnique Montréal
Field of study
  • Mechanical Engineering

Publications

Publications (142)
Article
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are responsible for a significant share of the energy consumed in commercial buildings. While energy system retrofits have been found to reduce buildings' carbon footprint substantially, these measures are often hindered by financial, regulatory or design constraints. Recent research sheds l...
Article
Facility managers and occupants can have a significant influence on the energy consumed in buildings through their operation of various building systems. Acknowledging this energy-saving potential, researchers have turned to building energy modeling to quantify the impact of human actions and operation patterns on building performance and propose e...
Article
A pre-requisite to reducing the energy intensity of the building sector is to assess and understand current drivers of energy consumption. Drivers include building design characteristics, outdoor environmental conditions, as well as the operation patterns of building systems by facility managers and occupants. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), whe...
Article
This paper presents an integrated data collection and analysis framework to comprehensively evaluate the impact of office indoor building environment on occupants’ comfort, satisfaction, and work performance. The latter includes the perceived productivity level of respondents as well as an objective measure of basic cognitive thinking skills. The f...
Article
Significant research efforts are directed toward measuring and understanding drivers of energy conservation actions of building occupants at home and work. However, there is a lack of studies that explore potential links or patterns in behaviors between the environments, despite a growing trend in the literature to expand the scope of research on t...
Chapter
With its in-depth investigation of the opportunities and obstacles facing the region, this book offers data-driven assessments and policy recommendations to guide the process of energy transition in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the current state of carbon reduction initiatives in the GCC and the...
Chapter
With its in-depth investigation of the opportunities and obstacles facing the region, this book offers data-driven assessments and policy recommendations to guide the process of energy transition in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the current state of carbon reduction initiatives in the GCC and the...
Article
Full-text available
As heat waves increase in intensity and duration, the risk of heat exposure in dwellings in countries with mixed humid climates is expected to rise. The impact of heat waves on building performance has been extensively researched. However, building performance during concurrent heat waves and power outages needs further investigation to reduce the...
Conference Paper
It is well established that occupant-building interactions impact both (1) building energy performance and (2) occupant satisfaction with indoor environmental quality. As part of an international research collaboration (the International Energy Agency, Energy in Buildings and Communities Programme, Annex 79 Occupant-Centric Building Design and Oper...
Article
Full-text available
The Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (EMME) region hosts some of the world’s most influential and troubled cities. It is also a hotspot of climate change and socio-economic and political turbulence, which inflate the already flammable conditions and reinforce existing local vulnerabilities. Some of the most arduous challenges of cities relate...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in working from home worldwide, making the work-from-home (WFH) setting a crucial context for studying the influence of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) on workers’ well-being and productivity. A narrative and visual synthesis of 41 research articles on IEQ in WFH settings was conducted to i...
Article
The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies road traffic injuries as a global health problem. The Eastern-Mediterranean region is particularly suffering from low traffic safety levels, recording the third highest death per capita ratio in the world. It is critical to evaluate and understand the causes of crashes and their severity levels as a fi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper develops machine learning surrogate models to emulate a Building Performance Simulation (BPS) model of an office building at low computational costs. Unlike most previous studies, the surrogate models include design and operational parameters as independent variables, and thermal comfort metrics as dependent variables. The findings indic...
Article
Full-text available
A net-zero energy community (NZEC) is a promising paradigm that can directly contribute to a sustainable building sector and infrastructure. This research presents a unique empirical techno-economic optimization and evaluation approach for NZEC potential and enablers through its application to the understudied context of Kuwait. The proposed approa...
Article
The residential energy demand timing and magnitude are highly impacted by occupants' behaviors and activities. However, acquiring a reliable data source for these activities is a vital challenge, especially on an urban scale. In this context, this paper presents a stochastic bottom-up model for generating electrical loads for residential buildings...
Conference Paper
Buildings are major contributors to global energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions, making energy efficiency in buildings a pivotal step towards a more sustainable sector. About 40%-50% of the energy consumed in buildings goes to maintaining comfortable and healthy indoor environmental conditions for the occupants. Therefore, developing insights...
Article
Full-text available
Sustainable buildings are designed to reduce energy use and other environmental impacts and to provide indoor environmental conditions that maximize well-being and satisfaction among building occupants. However, occupants' comfort in and satisfaction with such buildings has been inconsistent. Evidence indicates occupants' expectations of indoor bui...
Article
Full-text available
Buildings are expected to provide healthy and comfortable indoor environmental conditions for their users. Such conditions have diverse dimensions, including thermal, visual, air quality, auditory, and olfactory aspects. Indoor environmental quality standards, guidelines, and codes typically inform professionals in the building design and operation...
Article
The perception, physiology, behavior, and performance of building occupants are influenced by multi-domain exposures: the simultaneous presence of multiple environmental stimuli, i.e., visual, thermal, acoustic, and air quality. Despite being extensive, the literature on multi-domain exposures presents heterogeneous methodological approaches and in...
Article
Full-text available
With population growth, the demand for building construction is continuously increasing. This comes at the price of the built environment where the building sector is contributing to large energy consumption and carbon footprint releases. To encourage sustainable construction, contractors need to see the market benefit of “going green”. Previous st...
Conference Paper
The sustainability movement is increasingly impacting the construction industry, which has been quick to adopt innovative methods to deliver sustainable facilities. The literature shows that energy consumption in the building sector is increasing at a rate comparable to those of industrial and transportation sectors, and that buildings are responsi...
Article
The number of occupancy and occupant behaviour models developed for building performance simulation (BPS) has steadily increased for the past four decades. However, their use is still limited in practice. This is partly due to the difficulty in understanding their utility and to the challenges related to their implementation into BPS. Both problems...
Article
Full-text available
This paper introduces a database of 34 field-measured building occupant behavior datasets collected from 15 countries and 39 institutions across 10 climatic zones covering various building types in both commercial and residential sectors. This is a comprehensive global database about building occupant behavior. The database includes occupancy patte...
Conference Paper
The sustainability movement is increasingly impacting the construction industry, which has been quick to adopt innovative methods to deliver sustainable facilities. The literature shows that energy consumption in the building sector is increasing at a rate comparable to those of industrial and transportation sectors, and that buildings are responsi...
Article
Full-text available
Energy storage systems (ESS) provide buildings with the ability to store electricity generated from renewable energy sources (eg, solar photovoltaics), increasing building operational flexibility and reliability. Previous studies on ESS in buildings often make assumptions about key input parameters (eg, installation factor, roundtrip efficiency, et...
Article
The availability of computational power, and a wealth of data from sensors have boosted the development of model-based predictive control for smart and effective control of advanced buildings in the last decade. More recently occupant-behavior models have been developed for including people in the building control loops. However, while important ob...
Article
The relationship between the demographical characteristics of building occupants and their perception of indoor comfort is increasingly being studied. However, the added value from accounting for such characteristics when modeling and predicting occupants' perceptions remains unclear. An incremental machine learning (ML) modeling and analysis appro...
Article
Agent-based modeling is an advanced computational technique capable of representing complex and dynamic processes of human behavior in building performance simulation. Though the agent-based approach supports diverse applications concerning human behavior modeling within the built environment, there is no consensus on the optimal amount of informat...
Article
*** 50 days free download: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1epWJ7tZ6ZxQmO *** Research on the drivers of energy-related behaviors in buildings has gained significant interest in recent years. However, existing studies are often limited to a restricted scope of analysis (e.g., single-domain and single-cultural contexts) and rely on simplistic data an...
Article
The complexity of occupant behavior is one of the major contributors to uncertainty in building performance simulation. Agent-based modeling (ABM), a computational simulation technique, has gained attention in the occupant modeling field due to its capability and flexibility to capture the heterogeneity and dynamics of human behavior and the emerge...
Article
Full-text available
Green and energy-efficient buildings have gained wider acceptance in the last few years due to their ability to save energy and, in certain cases, the ability to generate electricity using rooftop photovoltaic solar cells or other renewable energy sources. One of the major challenges for these buildings is having economic energy storage systems (ES...
Article
Full-text available
A systematic approach to the design of metal-dielectric multilayer coatings is proposed for energy-efficient building glazing application. 36 coatings were modelled with alternating metal (Ag, Au, Cu) and dielectric (TiO2, Ta2O5, ITO, ZrO2, SiO2, Al2O3) thin films in 3- and 5-layer configurations. It was found that the optical performance is less a...
Poster
Full-text available
The Gulf Research Center is hosting its 2022 annual Gulf Research Meeting at the University of Cambridge in a hybrid in-person/online format. We will be organizing a workshop/track that will take place during the meeting titled “Carbon Neutrality in the GCC: Between Good-Intentioned Pledges and the Harsh Reality”. The call for papers is currently o...
Article
In line with global trends towards energy efficiency, Dubai's Government introduced Al Sa'fat Green Building Rating System (GBRS) to reduce the energy intensity of its building sector. This study presents the first comprehensive evaluation of Al Sa'fat with emphasis on building energy performance, shedding light on its effectiveness, limitations, a...
Article
Full-text available
Fuel cell- and electric-powered trucks are promising technologies for zero-emission heavy-duty transportation. Recently, Fuel Cell Trucks (FCT) have gained wider acceptance as the technology of choice for long-distance trips due to their lighter weight and shorter fueling time than electric-powered trucks. Broader adoption of Fuel Cell Trucks (FCT)...
Poster
Full-text available
This Special Issue of Sustainability is inviting papers exploring energy efficiency at one or more stage(s) of the building life cycle. We solicit papers presenting new ideas, concepts, models, methods, tools, standards, and applications. We particularly encourage contributions that aim to bridge the gaps between disciplines. Articles that explore...
Article
Full-text available
The intermittent nature of power generated by renewable energy systems makes it harder for many power grids to accommodate large generations in short period of times. In this paper, we quantify and discuss the cost associated with storing excess energy from the wholesale electricity markets in the United States in the form of hydrogen using proton...
Article
Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is a promising technology increasingly applied to various research fields, including building science and occupant comfort research. Using immersive virtual environments (IVEs), researchers explore important research questions related to how occupants perceive and interact with their indoor environment in response to...
Article
Effective building management strategies require a clear understanding of how occupants perceive their indoor environmental conditions. Despite their important findings, previous studies were mostly limited to single-domain evaluations of the indoor environment (e.g., thermal, visual, acoustic, or air quality), and rarely considered general well-be...
Article
Traditional occupant behavior modeling has been studied at the building level, and it has become an important factor in the investigation of building energy consumption. However, studies modeling occupant behaviors at the urban scale are still limited. Recent work has revealed that urban big data can enable occupant behavior modeling at the urban s...
Chapter
Access to reliable data sources is one of the most important prerequisites for quality research and innovation especially in data-driven fields, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the government has set bold targets to become a leading nation in research and innovation. However, when scientists request data fro...
Chapter
This concluding chapter presents an overview of the topics and case studies that were covered in the various parts of the book. The chapter includes a discussion of the key findings and insights learned, recommendations on how to address the challenges towards more effective implementation and advancement of AI technologies in the GCC, and directio...
Chapter
This chapter presents a detailed overview and outline of the book, which is composed of five main parts. Part 1—Introduction; Part 2—Data, Governance and Regulations; Part 3—Existing Opportunities and Sectoral Applications; Part 4—Society, Utopia and Dystopia; and Part 5—Conclusion. Each part includes multiple chapters providing insightful analyses...
Chapter
This introductory chapter starts with a short historical overview of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it has evolved over time. It then puts into context current and anticipated implications on politics, economics and society, and contextualizes some of the expectations surrounding AI held by its key stakeholders (national systems, economic sec...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This report summarises existing knowledge of the climate-related hazards facing the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (EMME) region and the current and projected climate-induced impacts to which it is exposed. The vulnerability of urban structures to climate-induced phenomena is related to the magnitude of climate hazards and is determined by t...
Article
Full-text available
Background Patient satisfaction is a multi-dimensional concept that provides insights into various quality aspects in healthcare. Although earlier studies identified a range of patient and provider-related determinants, their relative importance to patient satisfaction remains unclear. Methods We used a tree-based machine-learning algorithm, rando...
Article
Full-text available
Buildings’ expected (projected, simulated) energy use frequently does not match actual observations. This is commonly referred to as the energy performance gap. As such, many factors can contribute to the disagreement between expectations and observations. These include, for instance, uncertainty about buildings’ geometry, construction, systems, an...
Article
The aim of this work is to develop and validate a miscellaneous electric loads (MEL) predictive model that does not require occupant-wise or building-wise model training nor model adaptation while achieving competitive accuracy. For that purpose, a long-short-term memory (LSTM) model was developed using monitored data from a research building locat...
Article
Understanding and quantifying the drivers of energy consumption in buildings is an essential step to identify inefficiencies and guide energy conservation efforts and policies. While such efforts are common in western countries, they remain limited in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, particularly in the State of Kuwait. This article...
Article
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the impact of the built urban context on the cooling energy performance of buildings subjected to extreme hot weather conditions. The proposed approach combines building energy modeling with an extensive parametric variation and statistical analysis scheme. It provides a direct quantification of inter-...
Chapter
An important share of the energy demand of buildings is attributed to the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Simple changes in the operational settings of these systems, such as adjusting the thermostat setpoint temperatures, can have a significant impact on building performance (e.g., energy consumption and costs). In paral...
Book
This book presents the first broad reflection on the challenges, opportunities, and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Unique results and insights are derived through case studies from diverse disciplines, including engineering, economics, data science, policy-making, governance, and humanscience. Pa...
Conference Paper
The understanding of occupant behavior (OB) is vital to improve building energy performance, and this understanding needs an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates a holistic view of the topic. However, social dimensions of this behavior tend to be neglected. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study assesses the perceptions of occu...
Conference Paper
A sustainable building performance requires the efficient use of resources while providing a comfortable and healthy environment for building occupants. While energy efficiency and environmental comfort metrics are commonly studied in the literature, they are mostly evaluated independently, potentially overlooking conflicting relationships that may...
Article
Full-text available
Green building design is a promising approach to reduce the energy intensity of the building sector. However, green buildings often show important discrepancies between their predicted and actual energy use levels, in part due to varying operation patterns that are difficult to predict during design. This paper presents a data‐driven modeling and a...
Article
Buildings have emerged as one of the dominant sectors when it comes to worldwide energy consumption. While a large portion of this consumption is due to the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) loads, a significant portion is contributed through the use of standard equipment, also known as Miscellaneous Electric Loads (MEL). It is nece...
Article
We propose here a new approach based on a combined study of the self-cleaning and energy-efficiency properties of stratified WO3/Cu-TiO2 coatings for glazing applications. The multifunctional performance was investigated by varying the number of layers deposited on the glass substrate (i.e., 1, 2, 4 layers), while energy efficiency was assessed usi...
Article
Occupants are active participants in their built environment, affecting its performance while simultaneously being affected by its design and indoor environmental conditions. With recent advances in computer modeling, simulation tools, and analysis techniques, topics such as human-building interactions and occupant behavior have gained significant...
Article
In light of recent research, it is evident that occupants are playing an increasingly important role in building energy performance. Despite the important role of building energy codes and standards in design, the occupant-related aspects are typically simple and have not kept up with the leading research. This paper reviews 23 regions’ building en...
Article
In light of recent research, it is evident that occupants are playing an increasingly important role in building energy performance. Despite the important role of building energy codes and standards in design, the occupant-related aspects are typically simple and have not kept up with the leading research. This paper reviews 23 regions’ building en...
Article
In recent years, the search for sustainable development and environmental comfort has fueled exponential growth in the demand of smart glass for several applications including building and car windows, facades, computer displays, health care. Smart windows are meant to progressively replace traditional windows, considered as a less energy-efficient...
Article
Full-text available
People's subjective response to any thermal environment is commonly investigated by using rating scales describing the degree of thermal sensation, comfort, and acceptability. Subsequent analyses of results collected in this way rely on the assumption that specific distances between verbal anchors placed on the scale exist and that relationships be...
Article
Buildings play a dominant role in global efforts towards energy consumption reduction, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission mitigation, as well as global clean energy transition. Building Energy Policies (BEP) improved globally and quickly with a growing number of building codes implemented over the past decade. Occupant Behavior (OB) has significant impa...
Article
Full-text available
Building occupants are continuously exposed to multiple indoor environmental stimuli, including thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality related factors. Moreover, personal and contextual aspects can be regarded as additional domains influencing occupants’ perception and behaviour. The scientific literature in this area typically deals with these...
Article
Full-text available
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.