Applications of optimization methods in designing energy-efficient buildings

Energy efficiency in buildings is one of the top criteria, accounting for a large weight in the evaluation criteria of Green building rating tools such as LEED, BREEAM, LOTUS, ... Therefore high energy saving is the most important objective that green buildings should achieve. This article provides an overview of optimization methods in mathematics (problems of finding maxima, minima of a function) and the development of applications so as to integrate it into building design. Two typical case studies are used to illustrate the design method. The first is a naturally ventilated apartment building whose design is optimized with the particle swarm optimization, achieving maximum thermal comfort. The second case was a multi-objective optimization problem, in which an airconditioned dwelling is optimized by an evolutionary algorithm to minimize energy consumption while still maintaining reasonable construction cost.