Biomimetic Optimization Techniques and their Effect on Parametric Architectural Design

Abstract

Computer aided design (CAD) systems have evolved and opened the door to a new era of research and study that correlates architectural design, computation, as well as generative principles opening the door to the exploration of openended design solutions, producing a solution space whose boundaries are the constraints. This exploration process can be formulated as an optimization problem. This study presents a thorough explanation of biomimetic optimization, focusing on evolutionary optimization methods; the basics of the most famous common algorithms as well as a brief history about the application of evolutionary computation in architectural practice. This study also present a comprehensive review of some significant research studies applying evolutionary optimization methods to various building design problems. A total of 83 studies are investigated and classified according to the application of different evolutionary algorithms in 17 different key fields. The most dominant optimization method was the genetic algorithm (GA). Almost 66% of the works (55 publications) used single-criterion optimization whilst nearly 41 % (34 publications) used multi-criteria and weighted sum optimization methods. Keywords Biomimicry, Building design optimization, Biomimetic or Nature-inspired optimization, Evolutionary algorithms, Evolutionary strategies, Evolutionary programming, Genetic algorithms, Genetic programming.