ABSTRACT
A growing focus on occupant comfort, health and wellbeing has resulted in attempts to quantify indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and to determine the relative contributions of single IEQ aspects to an overall IEQ index. The recently developed IV20 tool assesses potential IEQ to label overall IEQ, and assign separate scores for the main indoor environment (IE) areas: thermal, visual, acoustic and air quality. In the absence of objective, universally applicable IEQ weights, this paper develops and executes a methodology asking regional experts with different backgrounds to make relative comparisons between related IE aspects. The authors hypothesize that wide-ranging subjective evaluations can be combined into useful relative weights (best operational solution based on the current status of IE literature).
This paper presents results from an IE expert survey on relative IE aspect weights using simple percentile prioritization and the Analytic Hierarchy Process pairwise comparison. Results are compared to expert panel judgements to ensure validity. The advantages of this combined weight determination method are (1) that the expert survey ensures a broad spectrum of opinions and allows for input from different built environment disciplines, and (2) that the expert panel has tool-specific insight, methodology awareness and state of the art knowledge.
Acknowledgements
The work presented in this paper was made possible by the support of the dedicated partnership REBUS – Renovating Buildings Sustainably.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Lasse Rohde http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1075-1874
Tine Steen Larsen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4704-6503
Rasmus Lund Jensen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7008-2601
Olena Kalyanova Larsen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6678-2955
Kim Trangbaek Jønsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7882-7900
Evangelia Loukou http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7554-1969