An Approach to Optimal Architectural and Urban Design from the Energy Efficiency Point of View

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to architecture and urban design that results in an increase of the energy efficiency of buildings set close to each other, which is set as the optimization problem. The main goal is to maximize the sunlight impact on objects, in a way to minimize inter-object shading on each building. The problem is solved by the PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) algorithm and its modifications, as well as the application of PSO algorithm with niches, which makes it possible to find a large number of local optima. It turned out that the PSO algorithm with niches is especially suitable for solving the described problems. The proposed methodology is illustrated by a few examples.