Evaluation of Multi-Criteria Selection Factors of Intelligent Buildings

The dramatic increase in energy consumption in the world and the resulting environmental issues are amongst the major concerns that have been attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. Taking into account that buildings are one of the largest energy consumers, improving energy conservation and sustainable developments play a critical role in the construction section. The optimized energy consumption management and the control of its usage, has led to the development of a new concept; Intelligent Buildings (IBs) as well as Building management systems (BMS) as one of the most comprehensive and effective intelligent control systems. The main goal of implementation of IBs is to reduce energy consumption through energy saving and conservation however, the wide range of factors involved in the design of such buildings has raised difficulties associated with the design decisions and needs a multi-criteria approach for evaluating influential factors and subfactors. In the present study, a comprehensive multi-criteria decisionmaking framework containing 68 sub-factors is proposed in order to provide a major insight into the selection of intelligent buildings. In this regard, 8 quality environment modules were considered as the main factors including environmental and energy indicators, space flexibility, cost effectiveness, user comfort, working efficiency, safety, culture and technological factors. Then in the next step, the validity of the proposed factors were evaluated through a questionnaire survey and gathering the opinions and perspectives of experienced experts active in the field of IBs. The collected data were systematically analyzed using SPSS software and the final weight of each factors were determined through an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. According to the obtained data, three main factors of "Safety and security", "User comfort" and "Environment and energy" are ranked in importance from first to third. The results can helps the stakeholders (clients, architects, engineers and construction managers) to obtain a better perception on the priority levels of each factor in IBs.