A robustness-based decision making approach for multi-target high performance buildings under uncertain scenarios

Shabnam Homaei,Mohamed Hamdy

doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.114868

Abstract

Considering the diverse uncertainties in building operations and external factors (i.e., occupancy and weather scenarios that can impact a building’s energy and comfort), performance robustness has become as important as the building performance itself. Selecting a robust and high performance building design is challenging, particularly when multiple performance criteria should be fulfilled. It requires performance evaluation, robustness assessment, and multi-criteria decision making in three sequential steps. The current study introduces a new robustness-based decision making approach that integrates the robustness assessment and decision making steps and is more transparent than previously used approaches. The proposed approach normalizes each objective function based on its defined target and combines them into one comprehensive indicator. Moreover, it penalizes solutions that do not meet the targeted margins. The new approach is tested on a case study of a single-family house, where eight competitive designs and 16 occupant and climate scenarios are investigated. Exhaustive searches and sophisticated engineering analysis are applied to validate the logic behind the approach’s results. In addition, a test framework is used to validate the reliability of the approach under different combinations of scenarios. The results show that the proposed approach can select a high performance and robust building design simultaneously with less analysis effort (no need for weighting the objectives nor for conducting a robustness analysis for each objective separately) and with much trustworthy rate (selecting solution in comparison to the defined targets and with less dependency on the scenario conditions) compared to one frequently used approach (i.e., the Hurwicz criterion).

Highlights

If uncertainties are not considered in the performance prediction, the decision making process can select designs that lead to more underheating hours during winter operation
This paper focuses on the selection of high performance and robust building designs under climate and occupant uncertainties
It introduces a new approach that integrates robustness assessment and decision making steps and selects the best design by comparing different designs to each other and comparing them to performance targets that can be set by building regulations, standards or the desires of homeowners

Summary

Introduction

Improving the energy performance of buildings is an essential goal in environmentally conscious societies. One of the actions that societies take to achieve this is to establish stricter standards and requirements for building components and performance [1]. There has been an increase in the construction of environmentally friendly buildings, these buildings do not always perform as expected, e.g., variations in thermal comfort [2], energy, or costs [3]. Designers estimate how a building should perform, but their estimates often deviate from the actual energy consumption when the building is in operation because uncertainties in the design or renovation phase are not adequately considered. The notion of uncertainties in the building context can be related to changes in the building environment, including climate

Methods

Results

Conclusion