Computing the minimum construction cost of a building's external wall taking into account its energy efficiency

By using Integer Linear Programming (ILP), the aim of this paper is to obtain this best choice of materials and thicknesses to minimize the construction cost of an external wall while complying with the abovementioned restrictions. A case study is presented with more than 5.5 million combinations of different selected materials and their thicknesses for the different layers of the wall. The ILP problem has been solved for 165 scenarios that take into account different maximal allowed thermal transmittances and a range of the most usual thicknesses and material options of an external wall.