## 1 Introduction  
The global population spends most of its time indoors, with a higher percentage at home than any other premises. Americans were reported to spend more than 65% of their time at home [1], while New Zealander and Canadian adults spend 60-70% at home [2]. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic late in 2019 caused the \"stay at home\" campaign to grow into a worldwide phenomenon as an effort to combat the pandemic and break chains of transmission. Lockdown, social distancing, and movement control orders are enforced in many countries, while remote working specifically from home is now the new norm. This further increases the amount of time we spend indoors at home. The Google COVID-19 Community Report ([[https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/](https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/)]([https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/](https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/)), accessed on 1 August 2022) data up to 5 October 2022 show an increase of time spent at home for most countries, with a rise of +4% observed in the United State and Canada, +6% in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, +9% in Malaysia, and +10% in Singapore. Additionally, time spent in the workplace is declining up to \(-26\%\) in these countries. At the height of the pandemic, venturing outdoors was allowed only for absolute necessary reasons such as for medical appointments. Most social and leisure activities were restricted in efforts to reduce the risks of close contacts and exposure to the virus. This abrupt change of lifestyle caused a rise in mental health issues due to loneliness, lack of physical and social interaction, anxiety due to changes in daily life, and many other reasons [3; 4]. These mental health issues are part of the domino effects of COVID-19. However, life is now getting back to normalcy, though some of the policies adopted during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak are anticipated to be maintained, particularly remote working. Employers and employees are responding positively toward the continuation of this arrangement even after the pandemic [5; 6]. Providing a comfortable indoor environment helps in improving productivity for the occupants [7] and also helps the occupants' physical and mental health [8]. Therefore, ensuring a pleasant and comfortable indoor environment is important. The indoor temperature, illumination, and air quality are known to be the major parameters that affect an occupants' comfort [8; 9; 10; 11]. Lighting, air conditioners, and air ventilators can be utilized to control these parameters so that a desirable condition is achieved, and the comfort level is maximized. Although the usage of these appliances contributes to better comfort, it increases the energy consumption. Reducing the energy consumption on the other hand may require the occupants to be less comfortable. Therefore, maximization of user comfort and minimization of energy consumption are two objectives that are related but conflict with each other. Metaheuristic algorithms are effective approaches for solving this type of optimization problem where a near optimal solution is provided within a reasonable computational time [12]. Natural phenomena has inspired many metaheuristics such as the bird flocking behavior that inspired particle swarm optimization (PSO) [13], honey bee foraging that inspired the artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) [14], bat echolocation for the bat algorithm (BA) [15], firefly communication via light emission that was mimicked by the firefly algorithm (FA) [16], and natural evolution that inspired the genetic algorithm (GA) [17]. ABC has been reported to outperform or perform as good as other state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms such as PSO, genetic algorithm (GA), and differential evolution (DE) [18; 19].