Acquiring the Foremost Window Allocation Strategy to Achieve the Best Trade-Off among Energy, Environmental, and Comfort Criteria in a Building

The purpose of this investigation is to propose a way for acquiring the foremost window allocation scheme to have the best trade-off among energy, environmental, and comfort criteria in a building. An advanced decision-making tool, named the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), is utilized to find the best building amongst different alternatives for having windows on the building facades. Three conditions, namely two parallel, two perpendicular, and three facades, considered as A, B, and C types, respectively, are investigated. For each type, four possible orientations are studied. Heating, cooling, and lighting energy demands in addition to carbon dioxide equivalent emission and thermal and visual comfort are taken into account as the investigated criteria, and they are all evaluated in a simulation environment. The results show that for the modular residential buildings chosen as the case study and located in Tehran, Iran, having windows on the north and east facades is the best scheme. This alternative, which belongs to the B type, has about 40% and 37% lower heating and cooling energy demands than the C type's foremost alternative. It is also able to provide about 10% better CO2 equivalent emission and 28% higher thermal comfort.