Evaluation of Metaheuristic Algorithms for the Improvement of Sustainability in the Construction Area

Abstract

NECADA infrastructure supports the execution of a simulation model of buildings or urban areas, taking care of environmental directives and international standards in the design process. The aim of this simulation model is to optimize the entire life cycle of the system from the point of view of sustainability (environmental, social and economic impacts), taking care of the comfort and climate change to achieve a Nearly Zero Energy Building. Due to the huge amount of factors to be considered, the number of scenarios to be simulated is huge, hence the use of optimization and specifically heuristics, is needed to get an answer in a reasonable time. This project aims to analyze the accuracy of two of the most used metaheuristics in this area. To do so we base our analysis in an extensive dataset obtained from a brute force execution, which represents a typical dataset for this kind of problem.