Towards the low carbon transition in the construction industry: A multi-method framework of project management operations and total building performance

摘要

The building sector is a large contributor to energy consumption and global carbon emissions. In urban environments, most people spend a large amount of their time in buildings, and their indoor environmental conditions can affect occupant health. The total building performance thus spans energy consumption, carbon emissions, and indoor environment. Underperformance in the building sector is frequent, and it is attributed partially to upstream process of construction project management and operations. Current project management approaches focus on quality, cost and time, so a new a framework is required to study this process in terms of total energy performance and explore ways to reduce the total performance gap. A multi-methodology framework is developed in the paper to analyse the effects of building development project process from an operations management perspective, on building energy consumption, carbon emissions, and indoor environmental quality (IEQ). The framework couples a system dynamics project development model to a building physics model. The paper details the steps of the framework along with the data requirements and the way the two models are coupled, so that it can be replicated on a case by case basis.