Developing a TBPE scoring framework for assessing total building performance

Abstract

Building Performance Evaluation (BPE) has received an increasing attention over the past two decades among the researchers to provide a comfortable and stable internal environment to increase and provide a better human potential. To determining how well the facilities are performing in order to support the organisational goals and user requirement, it is vital to conduct regular building evaluations which provide the current status quo of the building. Aiming to this, there are various BPE approaches developed around the world, and as evidenced there are no in-depth studies on Building Performance Evaluation (BPE) in tropical countries to evaluate the building performance. However, adapting these approaches might not necessarily be applicable in the context of tropical countries due to geographical, climatic, cultural and other differences. This has been identified as the gap in this research and aimed to formulate a holistic Total Building Performance Evaluation (TBPE) scoring framework, for the assessment of performance of buildings. First, a comprehensive literature survey was carried out. This was followed by an expert survey to sieve out the most significant BP factors identified in the literature survey. With that detailed questioner survey was carried out proposing a TBPE scoring framework compromising total of two hundred and sixty five points to evaluate buildings with 7 criteria and 57 dimensions in which energy management, reachability to the building, occupational hygiene, thermal comfort, unit costs savings, load bearing capacity etc had higher contribution in evaluating building with relation to tropical context. Finally, this paper readdresses the need of evaluating the buildings and suggesting the paradigm to evaluate the buildings in an objective manner.