Systematic Review of Energy Efficient Thermal Comfort Control Techniques for Sustainable Buildings Ghezlane Halhoul Merabet 1, 9,* Mohamed Essaaidi 1 , Mohamed Ben-Haddou 2 , Basheer Qolomany 3 , Junaid Qadir 4 , Muhammad Anan 5 , Ala Al-Fuqaha 6, 7 , Mohamed Riduan Abid 8 and Driss Benhaddou 9 1 Smart Systems Laboratory (SSL), ENSIAS, Mohammed V University of Rabat, 713 Morocco 2 MENTIS SA, 13, rue de Congrès, 1000 Brussels, Belgium 3 Department of Cyber Systems, College of Business and Technology, University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), Kearney, NE 68849, USA 4 Information Technology University, Lahore 54000, Pakistan 5 Software Engineering Department, Alfaisal University-Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 6 Information and Computing Technology (ICT) Division, College of Science and Engineering (CSE), Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha – Qatar 7 Department of Computer Science, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA 8 School of Science and Engineering, Alakhawayn University in Ifrane, 1005, Ifrane, Morocco 9 Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, TX 77204, USA Abstract – Objective. Different factors such as thermal comfort, humidity, air quality, and noise have significant combined effects on the acceptability and quality of the activities performed by the buildings’ occupants who spend most of their times indoors. Among the factors cited, thermal comfort, which contributes to the human well-being because of its connection with the thermoregulation of the human body. Therefore, the creation of thermally comfortable and energy efficient environments is of great importance in the design of the buildings and hence the heating, ventilation and air- conditioning systems. In fact, among the strategies to improve thermal comfort while minimizing energy consumption is the use of control systems. Recent works have been directed towards more advanced control strategies, based mainly on artificial intelligence which has the ability to imitate human behavior. This systematic literature review aims to provide an overview of the intelligent control strategies inside building and to investigate their ability to balance thermal comfort and energy efficiency optimization in indoor environments. Methods. A systematic literature review examined the peer- reviewed research works using ACM Digital Library, Scopus, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore (IEOL), Web of Science, and Science Direct (SDOL), besides other sources from manual search. With the following string terms: thermal comfort, comfort temperature, preferred temperature, intelligent control, advanced control, artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, building, indoors, and built environment. Inclusion criteria were: English, studies monitoring, mainly, human thermal comfort in buildings and energy efficiency simultaneously based on control strategies using the intelligent approaches. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines were used. Results. Initially, 1,077 articles were yielded, and 120 ultimately met inclusion criteria and were reviewed. Conclusions. From the systematic literature review, it was possible to identify the control methods used by the researchers, the most popular and efficient optimization strategies of thermal comfort and hence energy use in the built environments. Keywords – Buildings; Occupants; Control; Thermal comfort; Energy savings; Artificial intelligence; Machine learning; Heating Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems; Systematic literature review * Corresponding author: Ghezlane Halhoul Merabet (ghezlane.merabet@um5s.net.ma)