Software for the Multi-Criteria Design of the External Walls Based on User Priority

Abstract

The external walls of buildings account for a substantial part of the financial costs of the entire construction, and there can be a loss of up to 35% of thermal energy through them. By properly optimizing the price for the construction of m2 of the external wall structure and its thermal technical parameters, interesting savings can be achieved. At present, there is no multi-criteria analysis for designing external wall structure compositions involving broader input options according to the user’s technical parameters and priorities. There is a large selection of special software in the Czech and European markets, but the software is focused only on the narrower area of design and ignores the issue of building material prices. The aim of this work is to create an algorithm that reliably finds the composition that best meets the user’s requirements using a wide database of materials and selected mathematical methods. This article presents an algorithm that would design the ideal composition of an external wall. This algorithm has two options for searching. The first is based on eight technical criteria and the prices of materials used in combination with user priorities. The second option is to find the best composition based only on the specified interval of the selected technical parameters. Materials databases and the use of existing computational methods, such as the Saaty method and the WSM—weighted sum method, applied to the algorithm are essential to find the composition. According to the assignment, the structures will be clearly quantified in values from 1 (best) to 0 (worst). The algorithm, which is based on the analysis of data, sources, and theories of multi-criteria decision-making, should, therefore, facilitate the design of the external wall. At the end of this article, there is a verification of the functionality of the algorithm on a case study. We believe that software that uses the proposed algorithm could be very useful for practice.