Optimising Office Buildings to Achieve Visual Comfort and Energy Performance in Hot and Dry Climate (Case of Ahmedabad)

Abstract

With the increasing demand for sustainable design and green buildings, performance is becoming an important driving force behind design decisions. Energy modelling for the built environment should be considered at an early stage of designing and Conceptual modelling should be looked with the lens of environmental criteria to deliver performative design solution. The objective of this study is to propose a building optimization framework to allow designers to evaluate visual comfort and energy performance, generate optimized design options, and understand the relationship between design variables and performance metrics. Multi objective optimization is used to provide a valid support to buildings design in achieving efficiency while working conflicting criterias. They aim at identifying the most promising building variants on the basis of diverse and potentially contrasting needs. The optimization problem seeks three objective functions (increasing useful daylight illuminance, minimising visual discomfort due to glare and minimising energy consumption evaluating cooling loads) and uses various plug-ins and softwares in performing the environmental analysis and running the evolutionary solver for Multi-Objective based Optimisation. The study compares the results with an existing building located in the context of Ahmedabad. The results demonstrate thatdaylighting performance can be improved (UDI 200-1000 improvements ranging from 11% to 47% ) across a range of mass substraction methods while also reducing cooling energy loads (between 3% and 14% ) and annual glare (between 27% and 80% ) in a office building.