Abstract
Optimizing the building performance at the early design stage is justified as a promising approach to achieve many sustainable design goals in buildings; in particular, it opens a new era of attractive energy-efficient design for designers and architects to create new building constructions with high-energy efficiency and better overall performance. Accordingly, this study aims to provide a comprehensive review of performance optimization studies on heating, cooling, and lighting energy systems of buildings during the design stages, conducting a systematical review covering various aspects ranging from the building type, optimization inputs, the approach used, and the main conclusion. Furthermore, the benefits and limitations of early optimizations in the energy-efficient design performance of buildings and future research directions are identified and discussed. The review results show that previous research efforts of optimizing energy-efficient design performance in buildings have addressed a wide variety of early stage design optimization issues, including orientation and multi-objective building function-related conflicts, such as cooling and lighting. However, significant research issues related to investigations of design envelope materials, proper energy-efficient design form, and other passive parameters, such as solar photovoltaic systems, are still lacking. Therefore, future research should be directed towards improving existing optimization approach frameworks in the context of appropriate energy-efficient design features; integrating sensitivity and uncertainty analyses in the performance optimization framework of buildings to provide a more balanced assessment of influential design envelope properties and extending optimal design envelope investigations of buildings to include other passive parameters and lifecycle assessment under long-term weather conditions.
Highlights
Buildings are the only sector with the highest potential and lowest cost to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as societies evolved, energy uses in buildings have increased due to higher comfort requirements and relativity low energy prices from non-renewable resources, until it became clear that such high energy use of buildings has a negative impact on the economy and environment, and it should start looking for more energy efficient building solutions [1,2]
The contributions of this review study are; (1) to reveal the most frequently used optimization techniques and relevant optimized variables considered when optimizing the building performance in the design stages, (2) to highlight the most prominent limitations relevant to energy-efficient design performance optimization in the early stages; and (3) to refine a few key future tasks, which should be considered in the field of energy-efficient design performance optimization in the early stage buildings
Performance simulation-based design optimization is unquestionably a promising practice and strategy for achieving many sustainable building goals. It opens a new era of promising energy-efficient designs for both architects and designers to design new buildings, which are characterized by energy efficiency and better performance
Summary
Buildings are the only sector with the highest potential and lowest cost to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as societies evolved, energy uses in buildings have increased due to higher comfort requirements and relativity low energy prices from non-renewable resources, until it became clear that such high energy use of buildings has a negative impact on the economy and environment, and it should start looking for more energy efficient building solutions [1,2]. National building regulations, and local proactive planning policies, have been introduced to make buildings more sustainable [3] This coincides with several optimization techniques that have been developed to optimize the building envelope performance in the design stages by considering all influential factors related to construction components, thermo-physical properties, building geometry, building shape, control strategies, occu-. The design of sustainable buildings is slowly moving forward. The evidence for this is that the performance of the newly built buildings is very poor during the operational phase because 40% of overall energy usages for the lighting, cooling, and heating [3,6], and 39% of the global greenhouse gas emissions still come from buildings [7]. As per the two-degrees scenario, the building sector should reduce its total carbon footprint by more than 60% by 2050 to prevent the global temperature rise by 2 ◦ C [8]
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