A Multi-objective Approach to Balance Buildings Construction Cost and Energy Efficiency

摘要

The issue of energy efficiency of buildings must be taken into account as early as possible in the life cycle of buildings, i.e., during the architectural phase. The orientation of the building, its structure, the choice of materials, windows and other openings, all these aspects participate to the future energy consumption profile in a complex and highly non-linear way. Furthermore, even though sustainability is today a major objective, the cost of the construction remains another decision factor that cannot be underestimated - and energy efficiency and cost are alas contradictory objectives. Thus the problem of designing efficient buildings is a multi-objective problem. This work tackles this problem using a state-of-the-art evolutionary multi-objective algorithm, HYPE, tightly linked to an energy consumption simulation program, EnergyPlus. Several parameters defining the design are considered, namely the orientation angle, the materials used for the thermal insulation of the walls, and the size of the windows in order to explore daylighting. In the end, a diverse set of Pareto optimal solutions (i.e., solutions offering optimal tradeoffs between both objectives) are proposed to the decision maker. The approach is validated on five buildings of different categories, where energy savings of up to 20% compared to the original design are automatically obtained.