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Section: Application Domains
Concurrent design for building systems
Building industry has to face more and more stringent requirements, including energy performance, structural safety and environmental impact. To this end, new materials and new technologies have emerged [103] to help the construction firms meet these requirements. At the same time, many different teams or firms interact, most of the interaction being of non-cooperative nature. The teams involved in construction have different goals, depending on which stage they operate. Indeed, the lifetime of a building goes through three stages: construction, use and destruction. To each of these phases correspond quality criteria related in particular to:
These stages and criteria form a complex system, the so-called building system, whose overall quality (in an intuitive sense) is directly impacted by many heterogeneous factors, such as the geographical location or the shape or material composition of some of its components (windows, frames, thermal convectors positions, etc.) It is obvious that the optimization process of these settings must be performed at the "zero" stage of the project design. Moreover, the optimization process has to follow a global approach, taking into account all the concurrent criteria that intervene in the design of building systems.
The application of up-to-date concurrent optimization machinery (games, Pareto Fronts) for multiphysics systems involved in the building is an original approach. With our industrial partner, who wishes routine use of new high performance components in the construction of buildings, we expect that our approach will yield breakthrough performances (with respect to the above criteria) compared to the current standards.
The research project relies on the ADT BuildingSmart (see software development section) for the implementation of industrial standard software demonstrators.