## 1 Introduction  
Most industrialised countries are transitioning from a fossil-fuel-based economy to sustainable development. Thus, energy efficiency has become a common target for building designers and engineers. The preservation of a comfortable thermal environment in buildings is necessary to guarantee a pleasant experience for occupants. Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) plays an important role in occupants' daily life in terms of health, comfort, and well-being [1, 2]. Since an individual spends most of the time in indoor environments, thermal comfort is a topic of interest in many types of facilities, such as educational, office, and residential buildings. Therefore, it is necessary to find solutions to maintain indoor thermal comfort and simultaneously minimise energy consumption in buildings. Many studies have proven that the physical environment of an office has significant effects on worker productivity [3], so that the more time that workers spend in the office, the more important it is to guarantee positive IEQ conditions. For buildings with historical value, energy efficiency is a critical goal, since limitations on applicable energy solutions are imposed to preserve their aesthetic characteristics. Architectural constraints, often combined with economic difficulties, prevent the use of retrofitted technical solutions, causing high energy consumption and low indoor environmental quality. In this context, thermal comfort can be achieved with noninvasive strategies that include changing the input parameters of a heating and ventilation air conditioning (HVAC) system or strategically designing the interior furniture layout to better exploit thermal comfort areas. According to a survey of users of heritage buildingson thermal perception, although thermal perception was poor, the users still preferred to adopt passive thermal comfort actions, such as wearing more clothes, rather than invasive retrofitting solutions that could be expensive and represent a potential loss in building value [4]. [PERSON] et al. [5] designed a new air-conditioning (AC) technique to increase the air flow within a room, so that the summer temperature setting could be raised to use less energy, but still preserving a good level of thermal comfort. [PERSON] et al. [6] built a CFD model to study the effects of furniture layout on indoor air quality in an office. Results showed that the furniture position significantly impacted indoor temperature and velocity distribution, so it is possible to improve breathing zones without changing HVAC terminals. Several researchers focused on the topic of buildings with historical heritage. [PERSON] et al. [7] compared the thermal comfort perceptions within an old and a modern building. That study indicated that people had an overall impression of higher thermal comfort in the old building than that in the newer building. [PERSON] et al. [8] covered the theme of retrofitting historical buildings when, due to a valuable facade or other heritage preservation requirements, only inside insulation is allowed. The evaluation of thermal comfort is based on environmental and individual parameters. Thermal comfort can be evaluated with either the classical approach, which interprets the global and local thermal comfort via the predicted mean vote (\(PMV\)) and the predicted percentage dissatisfied (\(PPD\)) or adaptive approaches. The acquisition of the required data in order to evaluate thermal comfort is a time-demanding process that requires specific instruments to calculate the relevant environmental parameters. An interesting alternative technique to predict thermal comfort is CFD, which allows for evaluating the local distribution of the relevant parameters. In fact, CFD analysis is an important tool in the design phase to determine the internal layout, the operational mode of terminals (inlet temperature, air flow), and the position of sensors for room control systems [9; 10]. [PERSON] et al.