Building simulations supporting decision making in early design – A review

Abstract

The building design community is challenged by continuously increasing energy demands, which are often combined with ambitious goals for indoor environment, for environmental impact, and for building costs. To aid decision-making, building simulation is widely used in the late design stages, but its application is still limited in the early stages in which design decisions have a major impact on final building performance and costs. The early integration of simulation software faces several challenges, which include time-consuming modeling, rapid change of the design, conflicting requirements, input uncertainties, and large design variability. In addition, building design is a multi-collaborator discipline, where design decisions are influenced by architects, engineers, contractors, and building owners. This review covers developments in both academia and in commercial software industry that target these challenges. Identified research areas include statistical methods, optimisation, proactive simulations, knowledge based input generation, and interoperability between CAD-software and building performance software. Based on promising developments in literature, we propose a simulation framework that facilitates proactive, intelligent, and experience based building simulation which aid decision making in early design. To find software candidates accommodating this framework, we compare existing software with regard to intended usage, interoperability, complexity, objectives, and ability to perform various parametric simulations.

Performance Simulation Integrated in Parametric 3D Modeling as a Method for Early Stage Design Optimization—A Review

“…In addition, the informative support they offer concentrates mainly on the envelope and systems, rather than the geometry setup. Several challenges contribute to these facts, such as time-consuming modeling, large design variability, conflicting requirements, input uncertainties, and other factors [47].…”

“…Østergård et al [47] reviewed papers on building simulations in early designs identifying the following research areas: statistical methods, optimization, proactive simulations, knowledge-based input generation and CAD-BPS interoperability. Huang and Niu [72] studied papers on the optimization of building envelope design, compared popular algorithms, objectives, limitations, and potential breakthroughs.…”

“…Østergård et al [47] 2016 x x --Stefanovic [77] 2013 x -x -Huang and Niu [72] 2015 x x x x Attia et al [78] 2013 -x x x Lu et al [79] 2015 x ---Negendal [88] 2015 x --x Nguyen et al [89] 2014 x x x x Machairas et al [73] 2014 -x x x Shi [18] 2010 x ---Kanters et al [80] 2014 -x -x Hopfe et al [85] 2005 x x -x Crawley et al [86] 2008 -x x -Attia et al [87] 2009 -x -x Attia and Herde [8] 2011 -x --Zhao and Magoulès [81] 2012 x --x Pacheco et al [82] 2012 x ---Ochoa et al [83] 2012 x x --Tian [74] 2013 x x -x Evins [54] 2013 x -x x Iwaro et al [76] 2014 x -x -Fumo [84] 2014 x x --Shi et al [9] 2016 x x x x Hamdy et al [75] 2016 -x -x…”

“…A number of works investigate the theoretical framework of computational performance-driven design optimization [11,12,18,19,67,90,91], including some of the above-mentioned reviews and papers [9,18,47,54,72,76,77,87,88]. However, the following 13 works were found to utilize this framework in a practical manner:…”

A system for the management of old building retrofit projects in historical centres: the case of Portugal

“…Sustainable solutions are more appropriate when implemented in the design phase (Russell-Smith, Lepech 2015;Ochoa, Capeluto 2015). Table 1 addresses the common contents of the methods BREEAM, HQE, LEED, LiderA and SBToolPT, which are transversal in terms of energy saving (Ferreira et al 2014;Østergård et al 2016), ozone layer protection and resources reutilization (Lewis et al 2015).…”