Comfort metrics for an integrated evaluation of buildings performance

The capability of expressing all the different aspects of the building's performance, besides and beyond the mere energy behavior is becoming more and more important, because of the increased expectations related to either new construction or the renovation of existing buildings. Even though building energy performance is one of the main aims of an appropriate design process or of a suitable management strategy during the operation phase, it can be strongly undermined by the underestimation of the role of the indoor environmental quality. Poor thermal or visual comfort not only affects occupant satisfaction, well-being and productivity, but also induces actions and operations that ultimately compromise the energy efficiency targets. In order to support the design approach, including, since the very beginning, the comfort conditions among the design requisites, a set of metrics is proposed in this work, considering either time constancy or spatial uniformity of a single comfort aspect -or of different aspects at the same time. These metrics have been applied to a simulated reference environment, in order to test their ability to represent the performance of the envelope components when comparing building configurations characterized by high solar and daylighting gains and different window and shading configurations.