A review on contemporary computational programs for Building's life cycle energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions assessment: An empirical study in Australia

Choosing an effective and efficient building design option for energy management as well as for reducing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions associated with a building life-cycle is always highly challenging to any designers in the battle to tackle global climate change issues. Researchers around the world are thriving in building optimization models for developing strategies that would result in an overall reduction of a building's energy consumption aside from decreasing GHG emissions. Despite using similar input data sources, challenges to get similar results which are simulated from different software to assess environmental and financial aspects in a life-cycle of a system are still the dilemma to all sustainable development designers. Another difficulty, which happens in the progress of sustainable development in Australia, is that designers may have to follow a variety of green building rating tools to minimize environmental footprint and to increase the efficiency of buildings operation during their lifetime. Time will be consumed if design options are not appropriately and automatically calculated and assessed. In order to obtain building's life-cycle assessment (LCA) along with to achieve Green Star's certificate, choosing an appropriate program to calculate life-cycle energy consumption, life cycle cost and life-cycle GHG emissions are a necessity to designers. This paper presents a comprehensive review of all considerable researches focus on the biologically inspired algorithms to different fields of sustainable building designs and their module modelling development in recent years (up to 2016). Major fields are reviewed in detail, including building envelope design, comprehensive optimization of several areas simultaneously as well as configuration and control of building energy consumption. The outcomes of this study can assist researchers to choose which program is the best suitable for their study on sustainable assessment. In Australia, based on these design, practitioners can decide the optimum option for their project which can achieve their sustainability goals as well as can be granted the Green Star's certificate less sophisticated. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.