Abstract:

The renovation of a building involves not just the fulfilment of functional requirements, but
also considerations such as energy consumption, investment costs, environmental impact
and wellbeing. As things stand, new design methods and tools are needed, and the aim of the
research presented in this article was to develop a multicriteria tool, MultiOpt, for the
optimization of renovation operations, with an emphasis on building envelopes, heating and
cooling loads and control strategies. MultiOpt is based on existing assessment software and
methods: it uses a genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) coupled to TRNSYS, and economic and
environmental databases. This article illustrates its utilization in the renovation of a building
in Lahore which was representative of post modernism. The study started with the
monocriterion optimization of energy consumption, cost, thermal comfort, and life-cycle
environmental impact. It then moved onto multicriteria optimizations. The monocriterion
analyses focussed on the building’s characteristics and performance; the multicriteria
analyses were concerned with the interactions between the different objectives, and with
identifying their convergences and divergences. The results demonstrated that MultiOpt can
be used to compare different combinations of options and constraints, thus constituting a
basis for operational decision-making.