Performance Optimization Studies on Heating, Cooling and Lighting Energy Systems of Buildings during the Design Stage: A Review

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.

A Systematic Review of Passive Cooling Methods in Hot and Humid Climates Using a Text Mining-Based Bibliometric Approach

“…Optimization has been used since the 2010s. Gassar et al [85] conducted a comprehensive literature review of optimization studies for use in the building field. They excluded studies published before 2000 because the amount of literature on building optimization was not significant [86].…”

A Systematic Approach to Optimizing Energy-Efficient Automated Systems with Learning Models for Thermal Comfort Control in Indoor Spaces

“…For instance, Wei et al used CiteSpace (5.8.R3 SE 64-bit) to discover the relevant literature, which was also categorized with respect to the different approaches to zero-energy building research [8]. Gassar et al explore the performance optimization parameters and models during the design of buildings for energy-efficient heating, cooling, and lighting by surveying related articles and works in the literature [9]. In another seminal article, the façade performances of the buildings in Singapore were studied with regard to climate change by reporting the major factors, such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, corrosion, degradation, material use, and vegetation, which also influencing the building performance [10].…”

Integration of production scheduling and energy-cost optimization using Mean Value Cross Decomposition

“…For a recent survey, see, e.g., Gassar et al (2021). The idea, in Papers 1 and 3, that the home-owner would be able to react to the electricity price by changing the indoor temperature is a different one than the optimization of the design of the house.…”