The poor performance of buildings does not only play a major role in energy consumption but is also responsible for thermal discomfort inside the building. Prior to planning the building retrofitting, decision-makers need to evaluate different retrofitting strategies and their potential measures of energy savings on the current energy scenario. Therefore, this paper aims to integrate these factors and provide guidance on the most appropriate building retrofitting solution for reduced energy demand and better thermal comfort using as reference a typical Indian single-family house. This house is evaluated under five different climates of India. The work is focused on the comparative energy and thermal comfort analysis by considering the building as a stand-alone object. The building envelope of the example house model is improved for each climatic zone by retrofitting and compared with the reference condition to determine the potential energy savings and thermal comfort using TRNSYS18. This work provides a competitive analysis of more than 20 building retrofitting scenarios. The research provides a suggestion by using the "feasible envelope features" for design codes which propose feasible and optimized retrofitting strategy by maintaining thermal comfort and a baseline reference specifically formulated for thermal energy efficiency.

A significant proportion of the total energy consumption in office buildings is attributable to lighting. Enhancements in energy efficiency are currently achieved through strategies to reduce artificial lighting by intelligent daylight utilization. Control strategies in the field of daylighting and artificial lighting are mostly rule-based and focus either on comfort aspects or energy objectives. This paper aims to provide an overview of published scientific literature on enhanced control strategies, in which new control approaches are critically analysed regarding the fulfilment of energy efficiency targets and comfort criteria simultaneously. For this purpose, subject-specific review articles from the period between 2015 and 2020 and their research sources from as far back as 1978 are analysed. Results show clearly that building controls increasingly need to address multiple trades to achieve a maximum improvement in user comfort and energy efficiency. User acceptance can be highlighted as a decisive factor in achieving targeted system efficiencies, which are highly determined by the ability of active user interaction in the automatic control system. The future trend is moving towards decentralized control concepts including appropriate occupancy detection and space zoning. Simulation-based controls and learning systems are identified as appropriate methods that can play a decisive role in reducing building energy demand through integral control concepts.

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Acronym Description ATTreated Area BIPVBuilding Integrated Photovoltaics BIPVT Building Integrated Photovoltaic Thermal BISES Building Integrated Solar Envelope System BIST Building Integrated Solar Thermal CD Cooling Demand CFD Computational Fluid Dynamic CL Cooling Load