SEMERGY.net: automatically identifying and optimizing energy-efficient building designs

A central goal of European and national climate and energy programs is to reduce the greenhouse gas emission of buildings. SEMERGY is a web-based optimization environment, which supports users in decision-making regarding energy-efficient building designs. Taking the user-specified criteria investment costs, final energy demand of the building, and environmental impact of used building products into account, the system identifies efficient building designs and retrofit options. The following steps were taken: (i) development of a comprehensive building data model, (ii) creation of an ontology of linked building product data, (iii) development of a rule-based system to automatically identify valid construction alternatives for building components, (iv) development of a multi-objective optimization procedure, and (v) creation of a web-based Graphical User Interface to enable data entry and user interaction. The present contribution provides an overview of the progress made in the above mentioned domains.