MINGHAO XU
Architecture - Form - Performance - Sustainability
Intelligent Parametric Optimization of Building Atrium Design:
A Case Study for a Sustainable and Comfortable Environment
Research Project @ Sustainability
Yunzhu Ji, Minghao Xu, Tong Zhang and Yingdong He
• Formulated a technique converting building atrium shapes into rectangular profiles, optimizing their geometry for environmental efficiency and enhanced thermal comfort.
• Demonstrated framework efficacy with a Polish villa atrium optimization, achieving improvements in daylighting, energy use, and thermal comfort.
• Achieved a rapid optimization time of 36 seconds per solution, marking a substantial reduction in human and time resources compared to traditional methods.
Building atrium design is crucial to maintaining a sustainable built environment and
providing thermal comfort to occupants. This study proposes a parametric framework to optimize the
atrium’s geometry for environmental performance and thermal comfort improvement. It integrates
the parametric design, performance simulation, and multi-objective optimization in the Rhino and
Grasshopper platform to realize automatic optimization. The atrium’s well index, shape ratio, volume
ratio, position index, and inner interface window-to-wall ratio were set as optimized factors. For
the optimization objectives, useful daylight illuminance (UDI), energy use intensity (EUI), and
the discomfort time percentage (DTP) were chosen as metrics for the measurement of daylighting,
energy use efficiency, and thermal comfort, respectively. Moreover, a geometry mapping method
is developed; it can turn atrium shape into rectangular profiles. Thus, the framework can apply to
general buildings. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, an atrium optimization
case study is conducted for a villa in Poland. According to the optimization results, the performance
of the compared three objectives are improved by 43.20%, 15.52%, and 3.89%, respectively. The
running time for the optimization is about 36 s per solution, which greatly reduce the human and
time cost compared to the traditional working method.
Workflow of the whole research framework.
(a) The atrium mapping process; (b) the building plan converted after the atrium mapping
operation.
Current state of Villa Reden, atrium, and second-floor plan.
Simulation model mapping and parameter variables
Use daylight illuminance simulation results for different position indexes (the window-towall
ratio for the model’s left side is 0.1, and the other side is 0; IWWR is 0.5; WI is 0.9; SR is 1.0: VR is
1.0; the location is set at Boston, MA, USA).
Energy use intensity for different WI (the window-to-wall ratio for the model is 0.1; IWWRis
0.15; SR is 1.0; VR is 1.0; PX is 0.0; PY is 0.0; the location is set at Boston, MA, USA).
Validation of the atrium mapping method through UDI simulation.
The 2D scatter plots of design variables against objectives: (a) scatter plots of all design
variables against UDI and wEUI; (b) scatter plots of all design variables against sDTP and wEUI.
Model images, variables, and the objectives optimization proportions compared to the
original building.
Simulation of the overall best solution (after mapping), overall best solution (before mapping),
and original building (before mapping).