creator Claussnitzer, Sebastian advisor McLeish, Thomas J 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. Submitted by Liana Khananashvili (khananashvili@iit.edu) on 2014-05-01T19:33:29Z No. of bitstreams: 1 SebastianClaussnitzer_MS_ARCH_DEC 2013.pdf: 149191121 bytes, checksum: 7cf020d8a566a6c27c877b028ee23a25 (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2014-05-01T19:33:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 SebastianClaussnitzer_MS_ARCH_DEC 2013.pdf: 149191121 bytes, checksum: 7cf020d8a566a6c27c877b028ee23a25 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-12 M.S. in Architecture, December 2013 2013 2013-12 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/3203 en Thesis born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access ARCH / Architecture Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department