PROJECT 5 : Sustainability Assessment for Green Building and Retrofitting

Americans, on average, spend 90% of their time inside buildings. Because of greenhouse gas emissions due to the electricity distributed to buildings, minimizing building energy usage is considered an integral performance criterion from buildings to urban to global. The indoor environment has a direct impact on occupant productivity. There is a need for rigorous, flexible, and computationally-practical methods for assessing multiple performance objectives, so as to appropriately represent the “people, planet, profit” perspectives. Sustainability assessment for green building must encompass a range of objectives, including waste reduction, energy efficiency, cost, indoor comfort, social impact, and environmental impact. However, greater understanding is needed on how building options affect sustainability metrics. Architectural designers and building engineers possess building simulation software tools to analyze aspects of green building performance. However, no integrated systems approach has yet been developed that can employ a flexible cross-disciplinary analysis. This project will utilize existing software tools in the decision process.