Simulation-based optimization in architecture and building engineering—Results from an international user survey in practice and research
Thomas Wortmann
<p><span class="fontstyle0">Although there is a substantial body of academic literature on Architectural Design Optimization (ADO), not much is known about actual ADO practices and user experiences. This paper presents results from an<br>international user study of ADO with 186 respondents from various disciplines in architecture and building engineering. Compared to earlier user surveys from the literature, this survey employed a significantly larger sample size with active users of optimization in both industry and academia. The survey provides a comprehensive perspective on optimization in practice and highlights its utility for building design. Results can inform future developments of optimization tools to better suit needs and preferences of users, highlight a need to introduce optimization into architectural curricula, and ultimately contribute to the design of a more resource- and energy-efficient built environment. Most importantly, our survey suggests a non-ideal usage of optimization in design and research practice leading to, in the worst case, wrong conclusions drawn from optimization results. One prominent example in our survey is the potential over-reliance of (canonic) Genetic Algorithms for simulation-based problems: In the presence of low evaluation budgets, such algorithms will not converge, and modern model-based solvers would be more suitable. This demonstrates an urgent need to inform practitioners on more efficient tools suitable to the optimization task by, e.g., fostering the easy accessibility of such tools.</span>
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