Sustainable buildings, also known as green-buildings, reduce the overall impact on human health and natural environment in comparison with traditional buildings. In fact they are carefully designed to:
• use energy, water and any other natural resource in an efficient way;
• reduce waste, pollution and environmental degradation;
• protect occupants’ health realizing high-level indoor air quality and comfortable conditions.
Construction costs of sustainable buildings, constructed of expensive state-of-the-art materials and components, are usually higher than construction costs of the traditional ones. This can often represent an obstacle to their diffusion.
For this reason, although it is proved that life cycle costs of sustainable buildings are very low due to the very low amount of energy and resources required during their life cycle and the return of the initial higher investments occurs in a very few years, it is essential that designers try to keep the costs of construction of this kind of buildings so much close to the construction costs of the traditional ones, in order to speed up and promote their diffusion into the construction market. For this purpose, the multi-objective optimization can be successfully employed in the design of buildings that are eco-friendly and cheap at the same time.
In the framework of a research project called BENIMPACT, co-funded by the European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), modeFRONTIER capabilities are exploited in order to develop building design methodologies (and some prototypical software applications) based on the multi-objective optimization methods |