An approach to the optimum thermal design of office buildings

The paper describes a method for determining a thermal design for an office building which minimizes the sum of initial costs and running costs discounted over the life of the building whilst satisfying constraints deriving from technological and comfort requirements.A thermal model of an office building is described in terms of heat supply and heat losses and some ingenious features of the modelling are presented. Costing techniques for heating and insulating the building are also described. An optimization algorithm based on geometric programming is then applied to the thermal model and typical results are presented. The importance of sensitivity analyses of the results is stressed.