Interactive tool visualising and optimising building envelope performances during the architectural sketch design

The PC software AMCE provides building actors (owner, project authors…) with a multiple criteria decision aid (MCDA) procedure to optimise the building envelope cost and energy performance, during sketch design, when most important choices are fixed. Two main modules are linked: (i) the first manages parameters describing the project requirements; (ii) the graphic pen-based module allows one to draw the sketch, it calculates geometric parameter values and puts them back in the first module. Informed about foreseeable performances, the user can, at any time, search for the optimal scenario giving the best satisfaction (monoactor optimisation) or most preferred compromise (multiactor optimisation), he is given a lot of graphs illustrating the performance sensitivity to parameter variations, as well as an optimisation procedure using a genetic algorithm to find the most efficient parameter set