Future proofing a building design using history matching inspired level-set techniques

摘要

How can one design a building that will be sufficiently protected against overheating and sufficiently energy efficient, whilst considering the expected increases in temperature due to climate change? We successfully manage to address this question-greatly reducing a large set of initial candidate building designs down to a small set of acceptable buildings. We do this using a complex computer model, statistical models of said computer model (emulators), and a modification to the history matching calibration technique. This modification tackles the problem of level-set estimation (rather than calibration), where the goal is to find input settings which lead to the simulated output being below some threshold. The entire procedure allows us to present a practitioner with a set of acceptable building designs, with the final design chosen based on other requirements (subjective or otherwise).