Modeling a decision support tool for buildable and sustainable building envelope designs

Sustainability and buildability requirements in building envelope design have significantly gained more importance nowadays, yet there is a lack of an appropriate decision support system (DSS) that can help a building design team to incorporate these requirementsand manage their tradeoffs at once. The main objective of this study is to build such a tool to facilitate a building design team to take into account sustainability and buildability criteria for assessment of building envelopes of high-rise residential buildings in Singapore. Literature reviews were conducted to investigate a comprehensive set of the sustainability and buildability criteria. This also included development of the tool using a Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) approach combined with fuzzy set theory. A building design team was engaged to test the tool with the aim to evaluate usefulness of the tool inmanaging the tradeoffs among the sustainability and buildability criteria. The results from a qualitative data analysis suggested that the tool allowed the design team to effectively find a balance between the tradeoffs among the criteria when assessing multiple buildingenvelope design alternatives. Main contributions of using this tool are achievement of amore efficient assessment of the building envelopes and more sustainable and buildable building envelope design.