<p>Glazed balconies widely exist in college dormitories in cold region of China, which can not only create additional space as well as prevent dust and noise, but also have an important influence on building performance. Therefore, it holds great research value to explore how to effectively and reasonably design glazed balconies for college dormitories to minimize cooling and heating energy consumption while improving indoor thermal comfort. This study took a typical dormitory in Jinan City as an example and optimized the design variables of the glazed balconies from four aspects: building orientation, envelope, shading and natural ventilation. The developed optimization approach includes three major steps of (1) establishing a baseline model of the typical dormitory, (2) sensitivity analysis to determine the key influencing factors, and (3) multi-objective optimization by using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II to comprehensively analyze the influence of design variables of glazed balconies on building energy consumption and indoor thermal comfort. Analysis shows that the façade glazing type and natural ventilation rate have the most significant impact on the optimization objectives, while the effect of shading type is the least obvious. The optimization results indicate that the optimized design of glazed balconies has great potential in terms of comfort and energy conservation. A series of novel optimized design tactics for glazed balconies in college dormitories in Jinan are derived accordingly. The evaluation method and the simulation case study results provide a theoretical foundation and practical suggestions for taking appropriate optimization design measures for glazed balconies in cold regions to effectively reduce energy consumption and improve indoor comfort level.</p>