A Full Automatic Procedure for the Evaluation of Retrofit Solutions of an Office Building Towards NZEB

Energy consumption in the construction sector has a primary role in worldwide energy waste. Improvements in buildings efficiency can lead to high benefits for energy reduction. This work aims to present a retrofit project based on dynamic simulation and automatic optimization for building envelop refurbishment and heating system management as a sort of precontrol approach. A novel full automatic procedure is proposed, involving automatic calibration coupling IDA-ICE and GenOpt and a multi objective optimization of the retrofit solutions using a NSGA-II. Energy consumption, discomfort and retrofit investment cost are minimized for an office building in the city of Rome, Italy. Different results from the optimization are discussed considering more investment costs. Sensitive energy savings are also reached through low (or null) investment solutions because of the improvements in plant management.