A parametric building design tool for assessing energy savings and life cycle costs

An important part of building design and renovation is the need to select solutions using multiple criteria, including energy savings and life cycle economic impact. The difficulty lies in evaluating a large number of possible design solutions and/or their combinations, as well as having to calculate their performance and costs. The work reported in this paper proposes an assessment tool combining energy simulation software with Visual Basic Application for parametric building simulation and life cycle cost calculation. It aims to provide designers with a useful way of comparing the affordability of energy efficiency measures with low computational costs. A probabilistic approach is also suggested for global cost calculation based on Monte Carlo methods. The tool is applied to an existing building for which several alternative retrofit solutions had been designed. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the tool in providing realistic and useful results for designers and building owners.