Tradeoff between heating energy demand in winter and indoor overheating risk in summer constrained by building standards

Evidence indicates that improvement of thermal performance of building envelope has the potential for aggravating the indoor overheating risk in summer. On the other hand, evolving building standards continue to strengthen the requirements for thermal performance to achieve the energy-saving target. Therefore, this study quantifies the interaction effect between building standards-oriented building design, heating energy demand in winter, and indoor overheating risk in summer. Building databases with different energy efficiency levels are generated using a randomly generated method. Uncertain variables include not only 13 design parameters but also the running state of natural ventilation and external shading. The indoor overheating risk is assessed in terms of severity and duration. Finally, a multi-objective optimization model integrating meta-models and the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm is proposed to balance heating energy demand in winter and indoor overheating risk in summer. Results indicate that building standards tend to aggravate overheating risk in summer: the duration and severity of high-performance buildings increased by 40.6% and 24.2% than that of conventional-performance buildings. However, window ventilation could offset the adverse effect, and mitigation of duration and severity can be up to 85.2% and 62.1% for high-performance buildings. Window ventilation can weaken the conflict between heating energy demand in winter and overheating risk in summer. As heating energy demand increased from 6.1 to 67.3 kWh/m², the overheating risk changes little that the duration of overheating risk decreased from 17.5% to 15.6% and severity decreased from 8.7 °C to 8.3 °C.