The Efforts Towards Development of an Energy Optimization Dynamic Simulation Tool

EnergyPlus simulation run can be computationally expensive and take minutes or hours for full analysis. In Building retrofit at large scale needs to optimize opposing objectives, such as energy, cost, and comfort, and consider various constraints simultaneously. This complex task requires reliable tools that evaluate different retrofit scenarios for buildings and promptly inform the decision making. The current tools commonly lack automatic, multi-objective, and thorough retrofit scenario evaluation. This contribution presents the efforts towards the development of an automated building retrofit decision-making tool that can gauge cost-effective retrofit options using the EnergyPlus dynamic energy simulation software and the multi-objective optimization genetic algorithm of DAKOTA. This tool identifies the optimal alternatives for building elements and systems through an automated process, to maximize building energy performance and minimize the investment cost. This paper describes the technical procedure of development of the retrofit optimization tool. It then focuses on reducing its execution time to enable real-time simulation-based evaluation through adjusted parameter setting of the simulation engine and optimization algorithm, and finetuning the connection points.