Multi criteria optimization for High Comfort-Low Impact in Buildings A Tool for Designing Better Buildings

In the past three to four decades a building has evolved from more than being just a shelter and key elements that define the quality of a space today are Thermal comfort, Visual Comfort, Acoustic comfort and Indoor Air Quality. Any building tries to offer the best indoor climate irrespective of the outdoor climate regime at the expense of energy consumption. Building’s passive nature or the ability of the building to use the potentials of nature through cooling and heating are vested through the building form and design.
Thus these is a need for optimizing for the comfort parameters in the building in an integrated way or concurrent way so that some of the parameters that influence more than one of the comforts for example, windows could influence both the thermal heat gain (thermal comfort) and the daylight (visual comfort); in this kind of situations we need to work to find a concrete range for the window size and location that satisfies more than one of the building’s interior comforts.
The objective of this project is to come up with a cross functional optimization of building comforts (Visual, Thermal, Acoustics and Air Quality) through multi criteria decision making algorithm/ regression equations.
Expected Outcomes of this research project includes a Simple Regression Equations that can be used at preliminary design stage to quantify the various comforts. (Accuracy and precision of this equation would be cross verified with simulation tools). Secondly, considering building Form as a parameter for the comfort(s) optimization, would give a near optimum building form. And finally, a sensitivity analysis of parameters on Comfort(s), this helps in understanding the extent by which each parameter influences the comforts (Graphical Tool to visualize the real time change in parameters and corresponding change in comfort values).

Mentor: Pratik Raval

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