ABSTRACT

Current requirements for residential energy-efficient design solutions in China are relatively homogeneous, requiring only improvements in overall building energy performance, often ignoring the energy differences between different residential housing units. This paper proposes a multi-objective research framework based on an occupant behavior model of air conditioning and a Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) to study energy-efficient design solutions for residential envelopes. The optimal energy-saving design scheme has a 22.56% and 35.34% reduction in energy consumption difference between residential units and overall building energy consumption, respectively, both of which have been optimized substantially. Moreover, the overall energy performance of the building can be improved when the “energy performance difference between housing units” (EDH) is reduced, which verifies that EDH is an important criterion for improving the energy performance of residential housing units.