Thermal Comfort in the Built Environment: A Digital Workflow for the Comparison of Different Green Infrastructure Strategies

The green transformation of the built environment is aimed at improving sustainability and can be supported by digitalization, which has become a significant tool to support supply, integration, management information throughout construction life cycle. In addition, climate change highly affects human comfort in different strategies should evaluated for adapting cities. This paper developed digital workflow integrating existing tools (i.e., Grasshopper, Ladybug, Honeybee, Dragonfly) evaluate how infrastructure affected thermal reducing UTCI. was applied typical historical urban context (Catania, South Italy), consisting square surrounded three-floor buildings. Three basic scenarios were created that depended on pavement material used environment: black stone (reference from Mount Etna), permeable pavement, grass. These three combined with strategies: tree pattern square, walls roofs surrounding buildings, integrations all these above-mentioned strategies. results demonstrated integration (a grass instead trees, roofs) increased UTCI more than 8 °C compared (black building envelope). However, this temperature reduction location body into evaporation rates vegetation. will useful designers effectiveness during early-design stage mitigating cities change.