In the presence of renewed research and application efforts towards low or zero energy
buildings, the issues of fine-tuning comfort and fully understanding its connection with
energy use are becoming increasingly relevant both for research and application, and mostly
so in the Mediterranean zone.
This paper discusses how the evolution of knowledge on comfort and its incorporation into
international Standards, inter alia in the form of comfort categories for different types of
buildings, can influence the design, operation and evaluation of buildings in the
Mediterranean area.
We discuss some of the implications, obtained by the authors via dynamic simulation
software complemented by pre and post processing tools purposely prepared to ameliorate
and speed the treatment of comfort data. We present an optimization methodology, some
results in a choice of climates, and the current limitations and needs for improvement of the
indexes defined in the standards.
Critical analysis and results presented here have been developed partially under the IEE
projects Commoncense and ThermCo