AUTOCERT: A web-based approach for heating demand calculations for Building Performance Evaluation and Optimization

Abstract

In most European countries the thermal performance of buildings must be specified in terms of energy certificates. These involve, amongst other things, the calculation of buildings' heating demand. However, architects and planners tend to use heating demand calculations obtained from energy certification tools to evaluate the impact of design alternatives on buildings' thermal performance. Typical existing calculations tools do not effectively support automated parametric change of input data. Manual change of input data might be a time-consuming and error-prone process. This circumstance motivated the present contribution: A simple annual standard calculation method was analysed and redesigned to be used in a web-based environment. The resulting tool can accept input data arrays (consisting of a starting- point, an end-point and a step-width value for constitutive input variables) and compute the heating demand for the resulting variants. Therefore, planners can explore the implications of variable ranges of various design features (e.g., percentage of glazing in the façade, U-values of the building's constitutive elements) for the magnitude of heating demand. The present contribution describes the structure of the tool. Moreover, ongoing work is described that addresses the algorithmic cost of calculation of all variants and potential solutions involving, for example, the use of genetic algorithms.