Multi-objective optimization in the SEMERGY environment for sustainable building design and retrofit

This paper reports on a specific effort (optimization procedure) within the on-going research and development project SEMERGY. This project is geared towards the development of a decision making environment for performance-guided building design and retrofit. The present contribution illustrates advances towards the creation of a multi-objective assessment-based optimization procedure for the selection of building products and materials in view of the ecological, economical, and energy performance of the building. SEMERGY associates the preferences and constraints of the user regarding construction systems, performance level, environmental foot-print and investment costs, with existing building products on the market. Supported by semantic web technologies, SEMERGY extracts building product information from various web-based sources and restructures them into an ontology of building products. The products are enriched by a set of additional properties which enable a rule-based automatic identification of valid construction alternatives for different building components. These alternatives are evaluated and benchmarked against various criteria, to determine the optimal solution(s).