Automated Building Construction Design Optimization for Reduction of Construction Costs and Energy Demand

Abstract

Considering both, the ecological and economical aspects in building construction engineering, is of high importance for a balanced and efficient building design. For high competitiveness on the markets, the need for novel efficiency metrics and automated optimization of the building plan arises. We introduce an efficiency measure for balancing the trade-off between construction cost and the heating demand as energy efficiency aspect. Thereby the building physics are precisely modeled and all possible variations of the particular material choice can be evaluated via simulation. By considering all possible variations of the particular plan, a large multi-dimensional search space can be defined, allowing search for the optimal design utilizing heuristic methods. Exploitation of the search space allows the quantitative assessment of plans with respect to the theoretical optimum and generally the qualitative comparison of different construction settings and different material choice for development of current best standard practice in building construction engineering.