Multi Approaches of Comfort in Architectural Design of Resdential Buildings: the AMACH Project.

The ever widening range of skills necessary for architectural design requires a specialisation of each player working together toward the same goal within a number of distributed tasks. Parallel to this dispersion of tasks, an information transfer must be established. This is rendered more important in tha the domains interest several actors simultaneously and that the process is situated in the early stages of design. Energy management for buildings is one of these tasks. It summons up at thee same time the architect and energy specialist. The very scientific nature of building energy information is very often missing in the professionnal training of architects. The complexity of the interrelation between site and climate factors on the one hand, and energetic performance evaluation on the other hand nevertheless requires the introduction of thermal evalauation, as early as the very beginning syages of design. Building design must be driven in its entirety : a computer aided design tool cannot be restricted to a relation or optimization of just one component of the performance or the quality of the project (for example, energy savings or thermal comfort conditions), but must pay particular attention to suggest "reasonable" solutions in a given context. This induces two requirements: to translate decisions made in the other domains with the constructive representation peculiar to each actor of the design; to manage the consistency and conflicts between the information flows forwarding between the different levels of evaluation. In this context, the multi-approaches of comfort in architectural design for dwellings (AMACH) aims at the integration of the evaluation of thermal, acoustic, visual, olfactory and spatial comfort conditions, in the early stages of a dwelling design, in a performing CAD platform: KREPIS. This project integrates at the same time a concern for the respect of the decision process during the design, the communication between different points of view of the participating actors and optimization of constructive parameters in relation to a complex network of constraints to which the project must answer. Two teams participate in the development of this project : one engineering school Ecole des Mines de Paris, and a private consulting enterprise specialized in computer science and building engineering, ID.BAT. The computer tool should be available commercially in about two years. This work is based on : an analysis of the design practices of the architect able to formulate models of the design process; A bibliographic synthesis on the knowledge and tools available nowadays for technical evaluation in these various domains; The elaboration of knowledge bases in each related domains materialized through simple algorithms or production rules. The development of multi-criteria analysis and optimization able to establish improvement strategies to the simultaneous evaluation of.