ThermoLLM: LLM-Based Multi-Zone HVAC Control with a Spatiotemporal Context

Abstract

Multi-zone HVAC control is a spatial decision problem in which indoor thermal evolution and control decisions depend not only on outdoor conditions and internal heat gains but also on zone layout, physical adjacency, and delayed thermal interactions across the building. Recent LLM-based HVAC controllers have shown that prompt-based control is feasible. However, these methods produce inconsistent results, are difficult to generalize, and experience control-latency issues. Their performance also relies heavily on numeric reward values, textual feedback, or unstructured retrieval, which limits their ability to make control decisions that account for zone dynamics and thermodynamics. No existing LLM-based methods have used building semantics and dynamics, together with rolling history, as the centre of the LLM context while testing and comparing HVAC control performance with existing LLM-based HVAC approaches. This paper presents ThermoLLM, an LLM-based HVAC control framework tested in a multi-zone building environment. Spatiotemporal context grounding is a main component of ThermoLLM, which uses a spatial knowledge graph derived from Brick-style building semantics and linked with recent observations from a rolling history. We evaluate ThermoLLM against standard control methods and recent state-of-the-art baselines in a five-zone building environment across six climate-season scenarios. ThermoLLM consistently achieves the best energy-comfort trade-offs and outperforms all evaluated baselines in the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) rankings across all six scenarios.