Empowering sustainable design decisions: A multicriteria metric for optimizing solar protection systems

BETMAN, ALICIA; BALTER, JULIETA; GANEM, CAROLINA; HEIM, DARIUSZ

Energy for Sustainable Development

ELSEVIER

Año: 2025 vol. 89

0973-0826

The accelerated growth of urban areas has significantly increased global energy consumption and greenhouse gasemissions, highlighting the urgency of integrating sustainable strategies into architectural design. This studyproposes a methodological framework to support decision-making during the early design stages throughparametric simulations and multi-objective optimization. The objective is to improve energy performance byanalyzing the geometric characteristics of solar shading systems in a form of external venetian blinds acrossmultiple design scenarios.A statistical correlation analysis was carried out to identify the design parameters with the greatest influenceon energy performance. The results indicate that the depth of the shading device and the number of louversconsistently correlate with both cooling energy demand and daylight availability, regardless of climate. Thesecorrelations align with the geometric patterns observed in the optimized solutions, underscoring the value ofdata-driven approaches in developing climate-responsive strategies.The NSGA-II algorithm was used to optimize two conflicting objectives: minimizing cooling energy demandand maximizing daylight quality. The resulting Pareto front provided a diverse set of non-dominated solutions,allowing for the exploration of performance trade-offs. To enhance interpretability, K-Means clustering wasapplied to group optimal configurations.The methodology was tested in two variant ASHRAE climate zones—5B (cool-dry, Mendoza, Argentina) and5A (cool-humid, Ł´od´z, Poland)—achieving cooling demand reductions of 39.8 % and 33.5 %, respectively, withproportional decreases in CO₂ emissions linked to the carbon intensity of the local grids, while maintainingstrong performance in Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI). As its main contribution, this study introduces theShading Multicriteria Metric (SMM), which integrates thermal, daylight, and environmental indicators into asingle adaptable metric. Beyond case-specific results, the framework demonstrates its value as a replicablemethodological approach, capable of guiding early-stage design decisions toward geometrically diverse, climateresponsive,and energy-efficient solutions that align with long-term sustainability goals.