Aggregating Opinions to Design Energy-Efficient Buildings

In this research-in-progress paper we present a new real world domain for studying the aggregation of different opinions: early stage architectural design of buildings. This is an important real world application, not only because building design and construction is one of the world’s largest industries measured by global expenditures, but also because the early stage design decision making has a significant impact on the energy consumption of buildings. We present a mapping between the domain of architecture and engineering research and that of the agent models present in the literature. We study the importance of forming diverse teams when aggregating the opinions of different agents for architectural design, and also the effect of having agents optimizing for different factors of a multi-objective optimization design problem. We find that a diverse team of agents is able to provide a higher number of top ranked solutions for the early stage designer to choose from. Finally, we present the next steps for a deeper exploration of our questions.