Exploring the renovation design space: A new iterative approach based on scenario distance metrics and resampling strategies

Abstract Supporting designers in making effective renovation decisions is urgently needed to address the ever-growing climate crisis. This requires developing tools that bring insight into the enormous set of design options at hand, where the efficacy of candidate renovation design options is evaluated using (potentially computationally expensive) simulations. Thus, a systematic, goal-driven design process is required that ensures “design space” diversity and coverage, while making careful and effective use of highly informative but time consuming performance simulations. To this end, we define twelve new concepts based on scenario (dis)similarity that give designers insight about pairs of scenarios, clusters of scenarios, and pairs of clusters, and apply these concepts in an iterative, goal-driven design process. We evaluate a software implementation of our design concept analyser using a real renovation case of a large residential building in Denmark.