IMPROVING DECISION-MAKING FOR ENERGY PERFORMANCE OF BUILDINGS WITH COMPUTATIONAL TOOLS IN EARLY DESIGN STAGES Claussnitzer, Sebastian In the early design stages of architectural practice, a relative absence of advanced decision-making processes limits the number of building-design options that can be exam- ined for energy e ciency. This paper proposes to improve the design process by enhancing decision-making with computational tools: speci cally, tools that autonomously generate and evaluate thousands of design options. Two di erent tools were prototyped, each utiliz- ing contrasting algorithmic approaches. The rst prototype uses numerical optimization to autonomously explore the design space of a parametric building model, and simulates the annual energy consumption through energy modeling. The second prototype, in contrast, utilizes an exhaustive search to explore the design space of a simpli ed building model. Tens of thousands of simulation results are stored in a database, which users access through web-interfaces in near-realtime. The proposed tools for advanced decision-making enable architects to examine many more building design alternatives than are manually feasible, thus increasing the likelihood of identifying better design options. M.S. in Architecture, December 2013 McLeish, Thomas J 2013 2013-12 Thesis application/pdf islandora:7993 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/3203 ARCH / Architecture Illinois Institute of Technology en In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access