Planning energy retrofit on historic building stocks: A score-driven decision support system

Among the policies and regulations aimed at reducing the energy use in building stocks, the retrofit of historic buildings is one of the hardest challenges both for research and practice, because it is necessary to combine the traditional energy/economy targets with safeguard programs and conservation theories. In this paper, a decision support system is developed in order to plan and manage energy retrofit campaigns tailored for cultural heritage. Costs and energy uses are assessed, as well as the compatibility of interventions and their impact on indoor environmental quality. The energy use is seen under an economic, environmental, human and cultural perspective, providing a decision-making procedure that could be very useful for asset holders, public or private investors as well as for portfolio managers or agencies. The most important achievements in this work are the assessment of a so-called restoration score as a way to include conservation aspects in the selection procedure, and the integration of different appraisal techniques such as multi-attribute analysis, life cycle costing and analytic hierarchy process.