| Design of a high-rise office building, like any engineering design, is a complex multidisciplinary process with the objective to discover, detail and construct a system to fulfill a given set of performance requirements. The success of this process is highly dependent upon the cooperation taking place between the members of the design team. Although present-day engineering computer technology allows for precise analysis and design of the different subsystems of a high-rise building, it does not readily provide insight for choosing among alternatives of these subsystems to arrive at the best overall design.; This research study presents a computer-based computational method for optimal cost-revenue conceptual design of high-rise office buildings. Specifically, a Multi-criteria Genetic Algorithm (MGA) is applied to conduct Pareto optimization that minimizes capital and operating costs and maximizes income revenue for a given building project, subject to design constraints imposed by building codes and fabrication requirements.; The conceptual design process involves the coordinated application of approximate analysis, design and optimization. To commence the design process, a population of different alternative designs are generated. Using approximate analysis and design based on pre-developed data bases, the values of the conflicting cost-revenue objective criteria are established for each design. Then, a MGA is used to explore the design space and find improved designs having enhanced values of the objective criteria. The results, for a given building project, is a set of Pareto-optimal conceptual designs that define the ‘trade-off’ relationships between the three competing objective criteria to minimize capital cost, minimize operating cost and maximize income revenue. The corresponding three-dimensional criteria space is populated by feasible conceptual designs that are ‘equal-rank optimal’ in the sense that each design is not dominated for all three objective criteria by any other feasible design possible for the building. Life-cycle costing is introduced to investigate the profit potential of building designs over time. The conceptual design of four example office buildings are conducted from a variety of viewpoints to illustrate the capability of the computational procedure to create comprehensive computer-generated colour graphic representations of optimal cost-revenue trade-off relationships for office buildings taking into account architectural, structural, mechanical and electrical systems. While this study focuses on office buildings and corresponding cost-revenue criteria, the proposed computer method for conceptual design is directly applicable to any type of artifact and related objective criteria. |
