Development of an optimum design program (SUSB-OPTIMUM) for the life cycle CO2 assessment of an apartment house in Korea

The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate the applicability of an optimum design program (SUSB-OPTIMUM) for the life cycle CO2 assessment of an apartment house that can be readily utilized during the planning and design phases. For this purpose, a database containing information on the CO2-reducing performance and the cost of environmentally-friendly construction technologies that are applicable to apartment houses was constructed, and an interpretation program was built based on a simplified technique for assessing the life cycle CO2 emissions of an apartment house and the unit costs based on the inter-industry relation table. In addition, by integrating the interpretation program with an optimum design system based on an evolutionary algorithm, an optimum design system was created to compute the optimal solution with regard to the life cycle CO2 emissions and economic feasibility of apartment buildings. The applicability of the optimum design program developed in this study was evaluated by means of a case study. The case study results revealed that it is possible to compute the optimum combination of environmentally-friendly construction technologies, as well as the quantity of life cycle CO2 emissions and costs in order to reach a CO2 emissions target at a cost comparable to that of a standard apartment house.