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Proceedings of BSO Conference 2018: Fourth Conference of IBPSA-England

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Refurbish or Replace: Optimizing Refurbished and New Building Designs for Life Cycle Carbon Footprint and Life Cycle Cost Minimisation

Yair Schwartz, Rokia Raslan, Dejan Mumovic

Abstract: The refurbishments and replacements of existing buildings can significantly contribute to CO2 emissions reductions in the built environment. This paper presents and tests a novel approach for supporting the decision-making process in assessing the performance of refurbished buildings and their replacements, to achieve life-cycle CO2 emissions reductions in the most economically viable way. The proposed method, incorporating generative design scripting, dynamic thermal simulations and Genetic Algorithms optimsiation, successfully identified a set of pareto-optimal models, which achieved minimal life cycle carbon footprint and a minimal cost. Findings indicate that optimal refurbishments can achieve between 7-38% lower CO2 emissions, over an assumed life span of 60 years, and cost between 5-20% less than optimal replacements.
Pages: 185 - 191
Paper:
bso2018_2C-1