A Designing System for Multi-Family Housing

This paper reports on the development of a computer program, SYSBLD2, which generates passive solar designs for multi-family housing from a database of apartment plans, their components, and their associated economic and energy analysis. Although the program has been designed to be generic, the plans are associated with a precast concrete modular housing system. The program development acts as a framework for re-evaluation and modification of an industrialized housing system to include passive or low energy technology. Design criteria are established as objective functions which are linked to analytical programs and files in the database. The program utilizes the record structure of PASCAL to provide its data structure. Data input is interactive using a keyboard or digitizer; output is graphic or numeric.