Many-objective optimization for maximum flexibility in industrial building design

Industrial buildings often have a very short lifespan due to inflexible design of load bearing structures. Frequently changing production processes often lead to demolition of industrial buildings because these buildings cannot be adapted to the new requirements. This work is part of the BIMFlexi project, whose goal is to develop an integrated Building Information Modeling (BIM) based platform to connect all stakeholders in a building planning process to design flexible and sustainable industrial buildings. In this work a many-objective optimization tool is presented to support decision makers during the design phase. The tool is built on top of a parametric framework for load bearing structure generation. By presenting multiple optimized load bearing structures with different properties decision makers can make informed decisions about trade-offs between cost, environmental impacts and flexibility of a load bearing structure. The tool has been studied in two different ways. A user study was conducted to verify its usabilityand usefulness. A second study compared three different evolutionary algorithms to find the best fitting algorithm for industrial building optimization.