The comprehensive approach for a building envelope design involves building performance
simulations, which are time-consuming and require knowledge of complicated processes. In addition,
climate variation makes the selection of these parameters more complex. The paper aims to establish
guidelines for determining a single-family household’s unique optimal passive design in various
climate zones worldwide. For this purpose, a bi-objective optimization is performed for twenty-four
locations in twenty climates by coupling TRNSYS and a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm
(NSGA-III) using the Python program. The optimization process generates Pareto fronts of thermal
load and investment cost to identify the optimum design options for the insulation level of the
envelope, window aperture for passive cooling, window-to-wall ratio (WWR), shading fraction,
radiation-based shading control, and building orientation. The goal is to find a feasible trade off between thermal energy demand and the cost of thermal insulation. This is achieved using
multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) through criteria importance using intercriteria correlation
(CRITIC) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The results
demonstrate that an optimal envelope design remarkably improves the thermal load compared
to the base case of previous envelope design practices. However, the weather conditions strongly
influence the design parameters. The research findings set a benchmark for energy-efficient household
envelopes in the investigated climates. The optimal solution sets also provide a criterion for selecting
the ranges of envelope design parameters according to the space heating and cooling demands of the
climate zone