In the design process up until recently buildings’ energetic performances are contemplated almost exclusively during the check and validation phases. Nevertheless, many essential building features are defined during the schematic design phase, without real consciousness of the role of any design option in the buildings’ actual energetic behaviour. This situation is due mainly to the complexity of each design problem, typically ill-structured problems, but it is increased in the energetic field because of the complexity of buildings’ thermal behaviour itself.
In fact, building features, especially volumetric and formal ones, have an effect in terms of energetic need that is not easily predictable because of the mutual influence of energetic contributions.
Common simulation software programs performing building energetic analyses do not fulfil designers’ needs because they require the complete definition of the building model, which is not available during the schematic design phase.
This research aims at developing a design support system that allows the simple exploration of design alternatives in buildings’ conception phase and the execution of building analysis in terms of effective energetic performance. The system’s core are Bayesian probabilistic models, which manage a case-based database. Cases express design parameters and energetic performance knowledge and derived from common simulation software.
Working Group
Massimo Lemma, Alberto Giretti, Roberta Ansuini, Costanzo Di Perna (Department of Energetics), Roberto Larghetti