Functional requirements and system architecture for decision support of energy efficient building design in retrofit and maintenance stage

Abstract

This paper describes development of a methodology to support better retrofit and maintenance with optimised energy consumption using evolving technologies in material, components and systems both at building and neighbourhood levels. It is based on a retrofit and maintenance scenario focused on specification of the functional requirements, databases requirement and system architecture for the construction and operation of the decision support tool. Decision support (DS) tools have already been developed for architects and building designers to choose best building design options with retrofit and maintenance in mind. However, there is a lack of understanding of the required data structures, databases, definition of the functional requirements and the variety of the possible system architectures for this application. The proposed DS tool will support Facility Management (FM) to design their option on Building Information Model (BIM) file by making best retrofit and maintenance decisions for improved energy efficiency (EE) without needing full knowledge of the latest technologies in any required subject and without being expert in building energy performance analysis and simulation. A detailed retrofit and maintenance scenario and its corresponding process map are developed and explained in details. Database requirements are extracted and discussed, leading to specification of the necessary structure and content with a level of details. The functional requirements for retrofit and maintenance design scenario are discussed and an exhaustive list is generated. The decision support tool was structured using four building blocks: (i) energy performance and simulation block; (ii) retrofit and maintenance options generator; (iii) optimisation block and; (iv) a decision making block based on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method

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