REHA-PARCS

Building retrofitting is crucial to fight against global warming. New high performance projects are only 1% of the total amount of buildings. Then, the main issue consists in providing analysis, methodologies and actions to be able to easily and efficiently improve the performance of existing buildings. This approach has to be dynamic in order to fit the context that continuously evolves. This project aims at elaborating an interactive tool for decision making in the context of the retrofitting of important sets of buildings. The target audience for this tool is social landlords. Retrofitting projects are complex. One needs to analyze large sets of heterogeneous buildings and define suitable strategies that are technically and economically possible and rely on a complex decision process that can vary from one project to another. Therefore, new tools are required to promote affordable complex strategies based on energy and environmental performance simulation. And finally, a suitable decision framework has to be defined to ensure optimal solutions are selected. To achieve this goal, the project team proposes first, an original approach to model large sets of heterogeneous buildings. This approach is based on clustering methods. It consists in identifying main types of buildings within the set under study based on attributes such as target performance, statistic analysis, etc. Each set of buildings will have its own set of building types. Then each individual building will be tagged as being part of a building type category with particular attributes. This modeling process of large sets of building will allow a detailed analysis of retrofitting solution strategies based on simulation tools. And finally, a participative and interactive decision making framework will be developed to fulfill the requirements of complex decision process in such projects. Strategies have to cover long time periods while decisions are usually taken for very first improving solutions based on the available budget. This tool will allow social landlords to identify and prioritize the improvements that have to be made to each specific building based on an overall detailed dynamic analysis.