Dynamic simulation to identify cost-optimal energy requirements for the Italian building stock

The present work is aimed at advising the update of Italian law by identifying cost-optimal levels of minimum energy performance requirements for buildings. The scope is to investigate the suitability of simplified methods, such as the one officially adopted by Italian regulations, to determine the cost-optimal levels of energy performance. To this purpose, for a residential building, a cost optimal analysis was performed through detailed dynamic simulation and the NSGA-II multi-objective optimization tool, as implemented in DesignBuilder software. The results, presented in terms of “cost-optimal packages of measures”, show that different optimization methods lead to identify different energy efficiency technologies as cost-optimal measures.