Selecting sustainable building materials using system dynamics and ant colony optimization

Selecting environmentally preferable building materials is one way to reduce the negative environmental impacts associated with the built environment. This paper proposes a framework that incorporates environmental and economic constraints while maximizing the number of credits reached under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system. The framework helps decision makers with the appropriate selection of conventional and green building materials. It consists of two modules: System Dynamics module and Ant Colony Optimization module. The paper describes the developments made in these two modules, where the selection of building materials is carried out based on LEED credits and costs. The proposed framework provides more credits when using environmentally friendly materials. A case study of residential building is presented to demonstrate the main features of proposed framework

On the invariance of ant system

SCOPUS: cp.kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

On the Invariance of Ant System

Abstract. It is often believed that the performance of ant system, and in general of ant colony optimization algorithms, depends somehow on the scale of the problem instance at hand. The issue has been recently raised explicitly [1] and the hyper-cube framework has been proposed to eliminate this supposed dependency. In this paper, we show that although the internal state of ant system— that is, the pheromone matrix—depends on the scale of the problem instance under analysis, this does not affect the external behavior of the algorithm. In other words, for an appropriate initialization of the pheromone, the sequence of solutions obtained by ant system does not depend on the scale of the instance. As a second contribution, the paper introduces a straightforward variant of ant system in which also the pheromone matrix is independent of the scale of the problem instance under analysis.