A Parametric Optimization Approach to Mitigating the Urban Heat Island Effect: A Case Study in Ancona, Italy

摘要

The aim of this paper is to identify a parameterization method that considers existing\udconnections and relationships between traditional indicators of environmental sustainability as a step\udin combating climate change via urban strategies. A typical Mediterranean city (Ancona, Italy) is\udinvestigated with a multi-objective optimization platform called modeFrontier, which uses Pareto\udoptimality. This concept formalizes the trade-off between a given set of mutually contradicting\udobjectives, such as high thermal comfort and low energy consumption, to identify a set of Pareto\udsolutions. A solution is Pareto optimal when it is not possible to improve one objective without\uddeteriorating at least one of the others. The optimization process employs given constraints\ud(for example, meteorological scenarios with high temperature and low winds or morphological\udbuilding parameters), custom procedural algorithms (recursive algorithms to generate the set of all\udnon-dominated objective parameters), and genetic algorithms (inspired by the natural selection\udprocess) to examine a wide urban space and identify interesting relationships among relevant\udvariables for typical summer scenarios. Multi-objective optimizers involve many evaluations of\udtwo objectives (i.e., energy consumption and thermal comfort in this study) while considering many\udanalytical constraints. This approach entails a considerably more exhaustive search of environmental\udvariables that can help the urban planning process to mitigate the urban heat island (UHI) effect.\udThree quantitative metrics related to urban morphology and local climate conditions, as well as\uda thermal comfort indicator (the predicted mean vote), are defined and applied to Ancona to\udexamine the potential for new sustainability in urban design. The results show that two parameters\udexamined—compacity and a building-scale energy indicator—can offer insight when designing\udcomfortable cities, while a citywide energy indicator shows that it is more difficult to find optimal\udsolutions when dealing with the city as a whole. The research serves as a proof-of-concept and the\udpossibility of identifying some local strategies in order to combat the UHI is verified.