Optimization of an office building form using a lattice incubate boxes method

With the increasing demand for sustainable built environments, energy performance is becoming essential in the early design stage. Several previous studies using optimization of building form for energy performance considered simple hypothetical forms. In addition, previous multi-objective optimization (MOO) of building form and envelope did not consider views percentage to the outdoor (VPO) despite of its importance for human mental health and its conflict with energy performance. This paper proposes a novel lattice incubates boxes (LIB) method that optimizes a cellular office building form. It considers the entire building with 27 thermal zones in an attempt to mimic a real case study. In addition, it considers VPO as an objective in the MOO of building form and envelope. First, the study performs single-objective optimization (SOO) of architectural form and orientation for annual thermal Energy Use Intensity (EUI) in Cairo, London, and Chicago. Second, it performs multidisciplinary MOO of Cairo's form, window to wall ratio (WWR) and horizontal shading devices (HSD) for annual thermal EUI, annual Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI-100-2000), and VPO. Third, it develops the LIB method to make it more applicable in professional practice through considering 72 individual thermal zones while adding more constraints. Compared to the initial forms, first part EUI savings were between 16.86% and 12.9 %. EUI, UDI, and VPO savings for Cairo in the second part were 20.16%, 11.5%, and 19.5 %. Scatterplots are developed for the second part that show rows motion has the highest positive impact on UDI and VPO, WWR has a positive impact on all objectives and HSD has high positive impact on EUI only. Savings in the third part are 11 % EUI, 8.77 % UDI, 2.86% Daylight Autonomy (DLA) and 7.8 % VPO. Scatterplots in the third part show that almost all pro-posed form dynamic parameters have strong impact on all objectives.

Automated summary

This study proposes a novel lattice incubates boxes (LIB) method that optimizes a cellular office building form, considering 27 thermal zones and views percentage to the outdoor (VPO) as an objective in the multi-objective optimization (MOO) of building form and envelope. The results show that this method achieves good performance in energy efficiency.