Likai Wang

Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

For sustainable building design, performance-based optimization incorporating parametric modelling and evolutionary optimization can allow architects to leverage building massing design to improve energy performance. However, two key challenges make such applications of performance-based optimization difficult in practice. First, due to the paramet...

Significant research has been undertaken focusing on the application of evolutionary algorithms for design exploration at conceptual design stages. However, standard evolutionary algorithms are typically not well-suited to supporting such optimization-based design exploration due to the lack of design diversity in the optimization result and the po...

In performance-based architectural design optimization, the design of building massings and façades is commonly separated, which weakens the effectiveness in performance improvement. In response, this study proposes a hybrid massing-façade integrated design generation and optimization workflow to integrate the two elements in an evolutionary design...

The role of using performance-based design optimization in early-stage architectural design to prevent poorly designed buildings has been increasingly recognized by researchers and designers. Recently, a large amount of research has been made focusing on technical advancement, which, however, also reflects the limited research on how this technique...

The need for life-cycle energy (LCE) optimisation is imperative in the building sector. Computational optimisation has been adopted to evolve design populations search for desirable solutions with competitive LCE performance. However, prior studies typically focused on a predefined building form or typologies, which is less effective in assisting d...

Due to the requirement of design abstraction and simplification for early-stage building design optimization tasks, most applications of performance-based building design optimization are based on the designs generated using orthogonal and cubical geometries, which allows for simpler geometrical operations and sufficient design variability and diff...

When using computational optimization for early-stage architectural design, most optimization applications often produce abstract design geometries with minimal details and information in relation to architectural design, such as design languages and styles. Meanwhile, Generative AI (GAI), including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vi...

This paper presents an experimental course focusing on computational design optimization for performance-based building design exploration. The course uses a design system combining a parametric design tool with a cloud-based design evaluation server. The system allows students with no previous parametric modelling skills to conduct a series of com...

This study presents a design ranking method for evolutionary optimization that is aimed to address design optimization problems with many performance-related evaluation metrics. The application of the method consists of three strategies. First, all evaluation scores are expressed as percentages that indicate the proportion of the design achieving a...

In building massing design, using passive design strategies is a critical approach to reducing energy consumption while offering comfortable indoor environments. However, it is often impractical for architects to systematically explore passive design strategies at the outset of the building massing design and architectural form-finding processes, w...

The lack of consideration of subjective design intents hinders the application of performance-based design optimization to architectural design because building performance is not the only aspect that designers need to solve. In response, this study proposes a method integrating subjective design intents into performance-based design optimization u...

The paper presents a system for supporting optimization-based design exploration, with a special focus on comparing design strategies for early design stages. The system is developed to facilitate designers to conduct multiple optimization runs so as to compare the strengths and weaknesses among different design strategies. The system connects Rhin...

Benchmark designs can play a critical role in giving performative feedback to the design exploration process. This paper explores the idea of using computational design optimization as a way of generating such site-specific benchmark designs. A case study of the proposed benchmarking approach is presented focusing on public residential precinct des...

Computational design optimization has been widely considered a promising technique to help designers address complex design challenges regarding building performance. However, a barrier to applying it to real-world projects is the difficulty in incorporating functional requirements and constraints into the design optimization process. In response,...

As one of the most important factors for urban microclimate, the wind environment is crucial for conserving energy, reducing carbon emissions, diluting pollutants, and improving human comfort. This paper attempts to explore wind-driven design optimization of building layouts, and a residential neighborhood in Nanjing China is chosen as a case study...

Over the past decade, computational design optimization has been increasingly applied to the studies related to early-stage architectural design exploration and information extraction, in which various optimization approaches have been adopted such as single-objective optimization (SOO) and multi-objective optimization (MOO). Despite this, the impa...

This paper presents a framework for rapid design optimization, which is aimed to support the iterative design optimization process. The framework consists of Rhino-Grasshopper and an evaluation server. In order to speed up the optimization process, three strategies are implemented in the framework, including parallel execution, early abortion, and...

In architectural design, the design processes of building massings and facades are typically separated, which hinders the synergy of the two elements in sustainable building design. In response, this paper proposes an integrated design optimization workflow that can evolve design incorporating building massings with different formal characteristics...

The wind pressure on the surface of buildings can be critical, especially for high-rise buildings. To overcome the limitations in applying time-consuming CFD simulations to early design stage, we introduce a novel approach for generating real-time surface wind pressure in high-rise buildings through Deep Learning (DL). The DL model is trained on da...

对现有参数化建模和智能寻优算法技术在基于性能的设计优化方面的特点和局限性进行了剖析；根据设计师在方案阶段侧重于建筑设计探索和概念发生的工作特点，介绍了具有自主设计生成和探索能力的设计优化工具EvoMass，并展示了其在方案设计中的应用。应用结果表明，设计师可以通过EvoMass提取与建筑性能相关的设计信息，并将其融入概念发生和设计综合的过程之中。同时，EvoMass为性能设计优化流程提供了面向“人机协同的设计综合”的新方法范式。 This paper centers on the need for design exploration and concept development at the early-stage architectural design and investigat...

This paper presents a reverse passive building design approach for sustainable architectural design based on the use of performance-based design optimization. The approach considers building massing and orientation, both of which are of great importance in passive building design, and combines the two factors in a design generation and optimization...

This paper presents a ‘skeletal’ parametric schema to generate residential building layout configurations for performance-based design optimization. The schema generates residential building layout configurations using a set of ‘skeletal’ lines that are created based on various design elements and coincident with factors such as walkways, spacing,...

This paper presents a study investigating the impact of design spaces on performance-based design optimization and attempts to demonstrate the relationship between these two factors through the lens of the span of design spaces. The study defines the span of design spaces as the variety of different types of building design that can be embodied by...

The role of optimization-based design exploration in early-stage architectural design has been increasingly recognized and valued. It has been widely considered an effective approach to achieving performance-informed and performance-driven design. Nevertheless, there is little research into how such design exploration can be adapted to various earl...

In performance-based architectural design, most existing techniques and design approaches to assisting designers are primarily for a single design problem such as building massing, spatial layouts, or facade design. However, architectural design is a synthesis process that considers multiple design problems. Thus, for achieving an overall improveme...

During the early stages of design exploration, competing design strategies are typically considered. This chapter presents a design method, supported by a novel type of evolutionary algorithm, that maintains a heterogeneous population of design variants based on competing design strategies. Each strategy defines its own search space of design varia...

The complex interactive relationship between wind flow and building design poses a great challenge in architectural design. Recent research has been conducted to combine Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and computational design optimization to solve the problem. However, due to the time-consuming simulation process and the assertion-oriented comp...

One of the problems lies in performance-based architectural design optimization is the separation of building massing design and facade design. The separation of design processes significantly weakens the synergizing of building massing and facades for more progressive performance improvement. In order to overcome this weakness, this paper presents...

This paper presents an evolutionary design toolkit for performance-based building massing design optimisation (food4rhino.com/node/2974). The toolkit is aimed to assist architects in exploring a wide range of building massing design alternatives guided by various performance objectives, thereby encouraging architects to incorporate evolutionary des...

Using performance-based optimization to explore unknown design solutions space has become widely acknowledged and considered an efficient approach to designing high-performing buildings. However, the lack of design diversity in the design space defined by the parametric model often confines the search of the optimization process to a family of simi...

This paper focuses on the use of using appropriate parametric modelling approaches for computational design optimization in architecture. In many cases, architects do not apply appropriate parametric modelling approaches to describe their design concepts, and as a result , the design search space defined by the parametric model can be problematic....

Standard evolutionary algorithms have limited use in practical architectural design tasks. This may be due to the poor search efficiency and the lack of diversity of the result. In order to overcome these weaknesses, this paper proposes a hybrid evolutionary algorithm combining an island model approach (parallel distributed technique) and a steady-...

The use of parametric design optimization should not be merely a solution for design challenges, rather, a medium of reflection. The research explores how to conceive feasible design schemas and formulate appropriate parametric models capable of fully exploiting potential performance improvements through an iteratively reflective design synthesis w...

Evolutionary design allows complex design search spaces to be explored, potentially leading to the discovery of novel design alternatives. As generative models have becomemore complex, constraint handling has been found to be an effective approach to limit the size of the search space. However, constraint handling can significantly affect the overa...

This paper investigates the impacts of constraint handling on the evolutionary designs in terms of time efficiency and evolutionary effectiveness. To analyse this issue systematically, three generative models with different constraint handling strategies were constructed. The locality of the models and the associated positive and negative impacts o...

The integration of optimization algorithms and building performance simulation tools make it possible to carry out performa-tive design or performance-driven design, which aims to guide the design synthesis process of the simulation results to continuously improve the design. However, the associated research work of wind-related building performanc...

The integration of optimization algorithms and building performance simulation tools make it possible to carry out performa- tive design or performance-driven design, which aims to guide the de- sign synthesis process of the simulation results to continuously im- prove the design. However, the associated research work of wind- related building perf...