Flexbrick photovoltaic ceramic textile façade: a coupled EnergyPlus–Radiance–PV dataset and surrogate-optimisation pipeline across European climates
This deposit accompanies the study "Machine-Learning Surrogates and Simulation-Validated Multi-Objective Optimisation of a BIPV Ceramic Textile Façade: Energy, Daylight and Thermal Comfort Trade-Offs Across European Climates". It quantifies how the binary weave pattern of a 28 x 12 Flexbrick ceramic lattice - with each brick optionally hosting one photovoltaic cell - governs building energy use, daylight, thermal comfort and photovoltaic yield. The deposit contains: Main dataset (data/): 2,560 cases (512 Sobol-sampled weave patterns x 5 European climates, 50 columns), CSV + Parquet, plus the geometry-only descriptor table, the bare-facade baseline KPIs with per-case deltas, the hourly load-matching indicators and the hourly PV series; Generalisation dataset: 1,950 cases spanning six architectural contexts (orientation east/west, room depth 3/7 m, window-to-wall ratio 30/75%); Optimisation results (results/): the six NSGA-III Pareto fronts (five per-climate plus the 23-pattern multi-climate robust front) and the 28-solution re-simulation validation; 65 trained surrogate models (random forest, XGBoost and MLP per indicator, plus context-aware "generalist" models); The full reproducible pipeline (EnergyPlus + Radiance + pvlib simulation, dataset assembly, surrogate training, SHAP interpretability, NSGA-III optimisation and validation), the base EnergyPlus building model and the EDA notebook; PNG previews of all 513 facade configurations; Supplementary Material source tables (surrogate performance, context transfer, sensitivity studies, NSGA-III convergence, symmetry/order correlations, thermal-mass/vented-cavity spot-check); A column-level data dictionary describing every variable with units, ranges and definitions. Each pattern was evaluated, for every climate (IWEC typical years for Berlin, Barcelona, Seville, Helsinki and Turin), with coupled EnergyPlus 22.2 (energy and comfort), Radiance (climate-based daylight modelling) and pvlib (vertical south-facing BIPV) simulations on a single-zone 3 x 5 x 3 m perimeter office (15 m2 floor, south window-to-wall ratio 54%, ideal-loads HVAC). All performance indicators are anchored to a simulated bare-façade (no-screen) baseline. The surrogate models use a leakage-safe, configuration-grouped train/test split, and the NSGA-III optima are validated by full re-simulation. Energy-use intensities are reported per floor area (15 m2). The raw per-job simulation output (tens of GB) is not included but is fully reproducible from the released code; the five IWEC weather files are referenced by name in the README (not redistributed, ASHRAE copyright). New in v1.3.0: optimisation and validation results (results/), load-matching indicators, per-case baseline deltas, hourly PV series, feature-importance tables; ZIP paths normalised. Data, models, the data dictionary and the previews are released under CC BY 4.0; the source code is released under the MIT License. Please cite both this dataset (DOI above) and the accompanying paper.