# A Roadmap for the Integration of Active Solar Systems into Buildings
## 5 Discussion and Conclusions  
The main aim of this research is to create a roadmap that proposes a design path that a designer may follow to integrate an active solar system into a building. The research is based on the work of [PERSON] [26], which represents an early attempt to create a roadmap to ensure the viability of  
Figure 8: Illustration of the proposed methodology for a roadmap pertaining to the integration of active solar systems into buildings. building-integrated active solar systems. In order to achieve this, a methodological procedure was developed as an extension to the aforementioned roadmap. Given that contemporary architectural and urban design strategies with regard to buildings and building clusters aim to achieve the smallest possible energy consumption, challenges arise from the potential for local energy production, which depends on the use of renewable energy, and is interpreted as solar energy in a number of countries in the EU, since it accounted for 6.4% of the primary renewables production in 2017 for the EU-28 and 21.9% of the primary renewables production in 2017 for the southern EU countries [11]. This is because the main driver of energy consumption in buildings is thermal comfort for users; an example of this is the fact that 49% of the total household energy consumption in the United States in 2005 came from space heating and cooling loads [67]. This is because energy demand for climate control and the level of indoor environmental comfort that is achieved are interrelated, such that a higher level of thermal comfort demands higher energy consumption and vice versa [68]. This may be balanced in a nearly zero energy building given an appropriate study of the building's thermal comfort requirements and potential energy loads, which will lead to an appropriate selection of the type and size of the renewable system. Given that solar energy is the renewable energy that was chosen to cover the building's energy needs, the presented research aims to simplify and standardise the process of integrating an active solar system into a building in order to ensure that its energy and environmental behaviour complies with legislation and good sustainable urban and building design practices. The originality of this research is based on the fact that, although a number of other design tools/roadmaps can be found in the literature, none of them focuses on building integration. At the same time, the research complements the work and findings of other researchers on the subject [26; 27; 28; 29; 30], since it focuses on the sustainable use of building-integrated active solar systems in terms of their energy production potential. Specifically, the proposed toolset, which optimises a building's massing to harvest as much insolation as possible and promotes electricity production by the application of solar energy, is highly supplemented by the proposed roadmap, given that, in Step 1, the passive energy analysis of the building, or cluster of buildings, aims to confirm the ideal facade orientation for sustainable integration of active solar systems, and also aims to confirm that the selected massing configuration results in the least likely propagation of interfering shadows that could affect its performance. At the same time, Steps 2-4 deal with the active and passive behavior of the building's energy and environmental control performance, as well as with its energy production potential, which are dependent on its massing configuration. The research also supplements the work of researchers who have dealt with the creation of design tools that aim to optimise a specific aspect of a building design, or their geometric forms, in order to shape energy-efficient and sustainable architectural solutions [31; 32; 33; 34; 35; 36; 37; 38]. This is demonstrated in Step 1 of the methodology, where an initial optimisation of the building's geometry is proposed.