Decision support to enable energy efficient building design for optimised retrofit and maintenance

Optimising energy consumption of new buildings (through design) and reducing energy consumption of existing buildings (using optimised retrofitting or maintenance) are important to achieving the global targets of energy saving and cutting CO2 emissions of buildings. Many decision support tools have been developed for architects and building designers to choose the best building design options with retrofit and maintenance in mind. However, there is a lack of understanding of the required data structures and databases that would support design and enable Facility Management (FM) in making best decisions during retrofit and maintenance for improved energy efficiency (EE). To address these limitations a decision support tool based on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) for architects, energy designers and for FM is being developed within an ongoing EU research project “Design4Energy”, to enable design for EE maintenance and retrofit and support the FM in the operation stage. In this paper three aspects are presented: (1) analysis of existing decision support tools; (2) detailing the database requirements in terms of information technology (IT), components and systems, materials and the stakeholders on the basis of a literature search and a survey conducted with of stakeholders from the building sector; (3) a first prototype of a decision support tool for maintenance and retrofit being developed.