Using historic cases to formulate appropriate sustainable building refurbishment strategy

Existing buildings are indispensable in a society and they will continue to exist until they reach the end of their service or economic life. While it is crucial to upkeep existing buildings, enhancing their sustainability is equally important as the energy performance of some older properties is usually less than satisfactory. Despite that, it is never easy for citizens to establish which is the most suitable sustainable refurbishment strategy for their properties. If historic cases can be captured and represented systematically, owners and occupants living in properties of similar types can review the outcomes of these cases to decide whether some sustainable building refurbishment solutions adopted by the others before are applicable to their property. In the paper, a prototype case-based reasoning model for sustainable building refurbishment is proposed. This paper demonstrates how to make use of the proposed model to retrieve and reuse previous cases to derive suitable sustainable building refurbishment strategies for existing buildings.