The World Championship in Cybernetic Building Optimization (WCCBO) was held in 2019 to test participants’ ability to optimize buildings cybernetically. Office buildings with a total floor area of 10,000 m² were built in cyberspace, one for each of the 33 participating teams. The cyber buildings were controlled by BACnet, and the participants competed to show their operational skills by tuning the HVAC system of their respective cyber buildings online. The ability of optimization was evaluated in terms of both energy consumption and thermal comfort, and their scores were published online in real-time. A total of 339 different operations were tested during the two-month competition period. The top-ranked team succeeded in reducing energy consumption and thermally dissatisfied occupant rate by 12.1% and 21.0%, respectively. In this paper, we report on the examination of the rules and schedule of this championship as well as the analysis of the participants’ scores.

The importance of effective ventilation as one of the measures against COVID-19 is widely recognized worldwide. In Japan, at the early stage of the pandemic, in March 2020, an official announcement was made about basic ventilation measures against COVID-19. WHO also used the term “long-range aerosol or long-range airborne transmission” for the first time in December 2021. Based on the aerosol infection control measures before 2021 by the Japanese government, we conducted experiments on methods related to partition placement as an element of effective ventilation methods. In July 2022, the governmental subcommittee on Novel Coronavirus Disease Control provided an emergent proposal about effective ventilation methods to prevent two types of aerosol infection; infection by large aerosol on the air current and infection by small floating aerosol diffusion in a room. They also showed the way of setting droplet prevention partitions, which do not block off ventilation based on this investigation’s results.