A Methodology for daylight optimisation of high-rise buildings in the dense urban district using overhang length and glazing type variables with surrogate modelling

Urbanization and population growth lead to the construction of higher buildings in the 21st century. This causes an increment on energy consumption as the amount of constructed floor areas is rising steadily. Integrating daylight performance in building design supports reducing the energy consumption and satisfying occupants' comfort. This study presents a methodology to optimise the daylight performance of a high-rise building located in a dense urban district. The purpose is to deal with optimisation problems by dividing the high-rise building into five zones from the ground level to the sky level, to achieve better daylight performance. Therefore, the study covers five optimization problems. Overhang length and glazing type are considered to optimise spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA) and Annual Sunlight Exposure (ASE). A total of 500 samples in each zone are collected to develop surrogate models. A self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm is used to obtain near-optimal results for each zone. The developed surrogate models can estimate the metrics with minimum 98.25% R2 which is calculated from neural network prediction and Diva simulations. In the case study, the proposed methodology improves daylight performance of the high-rise building, decreasing ASE by approx. 27.6% and increasing the sDA values by around 88.2% in the dense urban district. - Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.We would like to thank Cemre Cubukcuoglu for the collaborative work while implementing the optimisation algorithm. M. Fatih Tasgetiren, who is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51435009), acknowledges the HUST project in Wuhan.Scopu

Performative computational design

Building TechnologyArchitectur

The analytical hierarchy process applied for design analysis

Being an intelligent activity, design is a complex process to accomplish. The complexity stems from the elusive character of this activity, which cannot be explained in precise terms, in general. In a design process, the determined relationships among the design elements provide important information to understand the role of each element with respect to others thereby improving the design. For this aim the method of analytical hierarch process (AHP) is employed which provides hierarchical priorities of the design elements with respect to the parsed design goal. The priority information is extended to establish hierarchical relations among the elements as a novel approach to employ in architectural design process.Architectural Engineering +TechnologyArchitecture and The Built Environmen

RBF networks with mixed radial basis functions

After the introduction to neural network technology as multivariable function approximation, radial basis function (RBF) networks have been studied in many different aspects in recent years. From the theoretical viewpoint, approximation and uniqueness of the interpolation is studied and it has been established that RBF network can approximate arbitrarily well any multivariate continuous function provided enough radial basis functions are employed. For the number of hidden nodes, type of radial base functions, width of the basis functions, cluster centres of the basis functions are some example issues on which numerous research works appeared in the literature. In contrast with this, however, there is remarkably only a few papers pointing out the functional approximation from the frequency domain view-point. They identify that basis functions basically behave as low pass filters. Due to this over filtering effect the RBF networks are not favourable for high frequencies unless relatively high number of hidden nodes is used. Therefore, for approximations that have only low frequency components, RBF networks provide satisfactory results and this is presumably the case in many favourable RBF applications reported in literature and vice versa. However, considering the filtering characteristics of different radial basis functions, one can improve the performance of RBF networks with mixture of radial basis functions.Architectural Engineering +TechnologyArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Identifying the surface materials of the existing environment through point cloud data attributes

The prospective application of 3D laser data scanning provides numerous possibilities for investigating environmental performances for architectural design. One of the possibilities includes the practical usability of point cloud data in examining the existing environment. Exploiting this potential would help to increase the information on properties of the real context, which currently often lack during the conceptual design process. As part of this general goal, this research particularly investigates the potentials of the surface attributes contained in the point cloud data such as color, position, and intensity information. The extraction of this information allows mapping of the distribution of surface materials of the existing environment by considering the intensity and the albedo values. The outcome of the research constitutes a catalogue of surface materials that are useful for architects as a decision support environments. In parallel with computational design flow, this research ultimately aims at delivering a novel method for architects to perform site analysis comprehensivel

The use and potential applications of point clouds in simulation of solar radiation for solar access in urban contexts

High-performing architecture should be designed by taking into account the mutual dependency between the new building and the local context. The performative architecture plays an important role to avert any unforeseen failures after the building has been built; particularly ones related to the microclimate impacts that affect the human comfort. The use of the concept of solar envelopes helps designers to construct the developable mass of the building design considering the solar access and the site obstruction. However, the current analysis method using solar envelopes lack in terms of integrating the detailed information of the existing context during the simulation process. In architectural design, often the current site modelling not only absent in preserving the complex geometry but also information on the surface characteristics. Currently, the emerging applications of point clouds offer a great possibility to overcome these limitations, since they include the attribute information such as XYZ as the position information and RGB as the color information. This study particularly presents a comparative analysis between the manually built 3D models and the models generated from the point cloud data. The modelling comparisons focus on the relevant factors of solar radiation and a set of simulation to calculate the performance indicators regarding selected portions of the models. The experimental results emphasize an introduction of the design approach and the dataset visibility of the 3D existing environments. This paper ultimately aims at improving the current architectural decision of support environment means, by increasing the correspondence between the digital models for performance analysis and the real environments (context of design) during the conceptual design phase

Data sensor fusion for autonomous robotics

Building TechnologyArchitectur

Designing for Pedestrians: A configurative approach to neighborhood planning and design, promoting pedestrian mobility, using an interactive computational design method for 'polycentric distribution of built space' according to walkability, attractions and topographic features

Architectural Engineering +TechnologyArchitecture and The Built Environmen

An urban walkability assessment model: Based on network distance metrics and topographic features

Building TechnologyArchitectur

Performative computational architecture using swarm and evolutionary optimisation: A review

This study presents a systematic review and summary of performative computational architecture using swarm and evolutionary optimisation. The taxonomy for one hundred types of studies is presented herein that includes different sub-categories of performative computational architecture, such as sustainability, cost, functionality, and structure. Specifically, energy, daylight, solar radiation, environmental impact, thermal comfort, life-cycle cost, initial and global costs, energy use cost, space allocation, logistics, structural assessment, and holistic design approaches, are investigated by considering their corresponding performance aspects. The main findings, including optimisation and all the types of parameters, are presented by focussing on different aspects of buildings. In addition, usage of form-finding parameters of all reviewed studies and the distributions for each performance objectives are also presented. Moreover, usage of swarm and evolutionary optimisation algorithms in reviewed studies is summarised. Trends in publications, published years, problem scales, and building functions, are examined. Finally, future prospects are highlighted by focussing on different aspects of performative computational architecture in accordance to the evidence collected based on the review process.</p