A case-based sustainable refurbishment framework for multi-storey residential buildings

Abstract

Improving the energy efficiency of existing buildings has been identified as one of the most effective strategies to reduce the carbon emissions as a high proportion of energy is consumed by building occupants. However, the biggest challenge is to persuade owners and occupants to take up sustainable actions as any refurbishment works would involve cost and may affect their daily life. A sustainable building refurbishment scheme may fail if it focuses purely on reducing carbon emissions without addressing the owner and occupants’ concerns. The problem is aggravated when a building facility is occupied by different people as their perceptions and expectations could be quite different. If successful or failure experience can be made available to owners and/or occupants when sustainable refurbishment decision is made, the potential benefits and drawbacks of different sustainable refurbishment solutions can be compared to ensure any possible concerns are dealt with satisfactorily. Case-based reasoning which solves new problems by retrieving, comparing and reusing the experience of old cases in a collective manner offers a good potential for modelling the complex and dynamic interactions amongst the building condition, human expectations and emission reductions. In this paper, a …