Knowledge about an existing building’s energy and environmental performance and information for optimizing the outcomes of retrofit efforts scatter significantly, and are managed by multiple stakeholders. Such fragmentation poses huge challenge for improving existing buildings’ performance and the sustainability of the built environment, and often causes inefficient use of capital resources. This project is responding to the lack of methodology and tools capable of factoring in multiple variables of different nature for the performance evaluation and retrofit scenario generation of existing buildings, and a lack of insights and systematic tools for identifying or creating retrofit opportunities with promising return on investment and social values.
Specifically, this project intends to (1) advance the capability to manage building data from diverse sources for reliable and efficient decision making support for continuous building performance improvement; and (2) develop a highly applicable method for retrofit solutions evaluation and optimization that pays attention to mitigation outcomes, occupant needs, and economic outcomes.