A knowledge-aid approach for designing high-performance buildings
Today, global warming and the sustained increase in energy prices have led to a quest for energy-efficient buildings among designers and users alike. This has been accompanied by increasingly strict thermal and energy regulations for buildings. In addition to such changes on the energy front, building regulations have also been created or reinforced in other areas, including accessibility, fire safety and seismic risk, alongside the demands of users. The combined effects of these two factors have made building design much more complex. Thus, designers are constantly in search of tools and information that can provide them with ways of designing high-performance buildings for their projects. In response to these needs, we propose an optimization-based, knowledge-aid approach for designing high-performance buildings. This approach is aimed at providing architects and design offices with clear knowledge of their project’s potential (exploration of various options) that will allow them to design the best possible high-performance buildings (in this version of the approach only energy needs and construction cost are assessed). This potential is evaluated by means of the external and internal geometric parameters as well as the energy characteristics of buildings. In this paper, the approach will be applied to an office building in Lyon, France.