Designing sustainable buildings: mcdm-23, a tool for making the right decisions

摘要

A sustainable building is the result of the design team making the right decisions during the design process. This is very hard to do in practice because it is necessary to trade-off many criteria at the same time. These are often contradictory, for example, minimizing operating energy and minimizing cost. This paper presents a new tool, MCDM-23 (multi-criteria decision-making / IEA 23), which helps a design team through the several required steps: (1) deciding on the criteria and deciding how to weight each criteria, (2) determining and rating a reference building, (3) rating each proposed design alternative, (4) entering scores for each criteria, and (5) displaying the results in a concise manner. The tool doesn't make any decisions, it only helps organize the information as inputs required to make a correct decision. The end result is a worsheet and a star diagram for each design alternative.