Integrating Circular Economy Principles in Urban Infrastructure: Algorithmic Solutions for Sustainable Management of Photochromic Building Materials

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_15How to use a DOI?

Keywords

photochromic thin films; predictive maintenance algorithms; machine learning; smart window technologies; building energy efficiency; circular economy; sustainable urban development

Abstract

The envelope of a building is one of the major levers to reduce the energy footprint of the built environment, owing to the degree to which heating and cooling loads are impacted by the energy performance of the facade. Photochromic glazing makes it possible to reduce that load without requiring the investment in wires, sensors and control units, but the technology has found it hard to move beyond the pilot stage mainly because owners are sceptical of the rate of decline of this technology and also the cost of such a decline. This paper reports an 18-month, five-climate-zone field campaign across 47 instrumented installations that pairs continuous environmental and optical monitoring with a two-stage machine-learning pipeline of a convolutional network that reads surface imagery for early visual damage, and a long short-term memory network that tracks time-series optical performance, with the two streams reconciled by a gradient-boosted meta-model. The combined model anticipated critical degradation events at an 18-month horizon with 87.3% test-set accuracy and 92.8% recall (AUC-ROC = 0.919-0.958 across splits), and outperformed both single-stream variants and a conventional multiple-regression baseline built from the same sensor data. The influential role of climate zone was revealed as it influenced the main mode of failure. In tropical sites, ultraviolet radiation was the main factor causing deterioration (R²=0.84, β=0.67, p<0.001) while thermal cycling prevailed in continental regions (R²=0.79, β=0.58, p<0.001). Cost analysis for a 20-year period, comparing photochromic glazing with reactive maintenance options, confirmed that it could deliver a 18-27% savings in total cost of ownership (p<0.001) and reduce the consumption of material by 34.7% and the amount of landfill waste generated from each system installation by approximately 2,847 kg.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - G. Subbulakshmi
AU  - M. Balachandramohan
AU  - S. Janarthanam
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/08
TI  - Integrating Circular Economy Principles in Urban Infrastructure: Algorithmic Solutions for Sustainable Management of Photochromic Building Materials
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Advancing Economics (ICAE): Redefining Growth: Integrating Economy Society and Sustainability for a Resilient Future (ICAE 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 240
EP  - 260
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_15
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_15
ID  - Subbulakshmi2026
ER  -