Low carbon building performance in the construction industry: a multi-method approach of system dynamics and building performance modelling

Abstract

The construction industry contributes significantly to energy consumption and carbon emissions. Moreover, people spend more time inside buildings, so their health is increasingly influenced by indoor environmental conditions. When considered through these lenses, the concept of total building performance can span energy consumption, the associated CO₂ emissions, and indoor environmental quality (IEQ). At the individual project level, building underperformance with respect to energy and IEQ is frequent, and the ex post performance gap is partially attributed to the construction project management and operations phase of the building lifecycle. This underperformance motivates the research of this paper into the construction process outcomes in terms of energy performance and IEQ, and ways to reduce the performance gap. The paper develops a multi-methodology framework to analyse the effect of building development project process on energy performance and IEQ from an operations management perspective. The framework couples system dynamics modelling of construction project management to building performance modelling. The paper details the way they are coupled, the application steps and data requirements, so that they can be applied on a case by case basis. The aim is to combine operations management to building performance disciplines and deliver insights for industry practitioners and policy makers.

Keywords:

• Project management
• low-zero carbon
• simulation
• building performance
• system dynamics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data available on request from the authors.

Notes

1 Committee on Climate Change, 2014. Meeting carbon budgets – 2014 progress report to parliament. London. http://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/meeting-carbon-budgets-2014-progress-report-to-parliament/

2 Special issue on Sustainable Development & Managing Projects in International Journal of Project Management

3 Building performance includes energy, emissions related to it, IEQ and also other architectural and functional aspects.

4 Semantics note: tasks and defects are standard terms in the SD project management literature. Defects lead to a deviation in project performance. In the building science literature deviation from project performance arises from technical defects, and/or deviation from set value parameters. Acknowledging the difference, the terms defects and deviation are used interchangeably in the text.

5 Available from https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/2644/SWP-3943-36987273.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed 27/03/2018)

6 This assumption also becomes more accurate as task size becomes smaller.

7 See working paper version pages 11–22

8 See eq. 30 in the working paper version of Ford and Sterman, 1998. available from: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/2644/SWP-3943-36987273.pdf?sequence=1 [accessed 16 January 2018]

9 The list of building defect areas under each defect category is based on EnergyPlus software.

10 This is currently under submission and has been presented at International System Dynamics Conference 2018, Iceland.

11 DesignBuilder software with EnergyPlus© as the simulation engine is the tool that our research team has significant experience in, but in principle any other tool could be used.

12 The intended application context as part of the funded research project concerns UK and China.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from ‘The ‘Total Performance’ of Low Carbon Buildings in China and the UK’ (‘TOP’) project funded by the UK EPSRC [Grant code: EP/N009703/1]. Corresponding research carried out in China is funded by NSFC China [51561135001].