The road to developing economically feasible plans for green, comfortable and energy efficient buildings

Owing to the current challenges in energy and environmental crises, improving buildings, as one of the biggest concerns and contributors to these issues, is increasingly receiving attention from the world. Due to a variety of choices and situations for improving buildings, it is important to review the building performance optimization studies to find the proper solution. In this paper, these studies are reviewed by analyzing all the different key parameters involved in the optimization process, including the considered decision variables, objective functions, constraints, and case studies, along with the software programs and optimization algorithms employed. As the core literature, 44 investigations recently published are considered and compared. The current investigation provides sufficient information for all the experts in the building sector, such as architects and mechanical engineers. It is noticed that EnergyPlus and MATLAB have been employed more than other software for building simulation and optimization, respectively. In addition, among the nine different aspects that have been optimized in the literature, energy consumption, thermal comfort, and economic benefits are the first, second, and third most optimized, having shares of 38.6%, 22.7%, and 17%, respectively.