Stakeholder-specific environmental and economic optimization of buildings in early design stages

Research Project, 2021 – 2024

Especially in early design phases, there is a big potential to increase the environmental and economic performance of buildings over the whole life cycle. With Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) the scientific methods exist today. However, they are currently too complex to allow stakeholders to use the results for informed decision-making and optimization of building designs.

The aim of this project is developing a stakeholder-specific decision support for environmental and economic optimization of buildings in early design phases. The three main objectives include 1) combining LCA and LCC into a consistent framework for the Swedish context, 2) implementing it into a design-integrated tool and linking it with computational optimisers, 3) developing intuitive and stakeholder-specific visualisations of the results.

The outcomes of this project will benefit stakeholders from architects to contractors, to public authorities and individual building owners. The defined decision support process and the corresponding digital tool will allow for a variety of applications, such as identifying the most environment-friendly retrofit option for a specific budget or designing new affordable housing with low environmental impact. Finally, the project will support society to make use of the huge potential of the building sector to save GHG emissions and to fulfil the UN SDGs.