An interactive multi-criteria decision-making method for building performance design

Building performance design is essential to support sustainable urban development. It involves multiple conflicting performance, such as energy consumption and daylighting. These potential conflicts present a challenging issue for architects to get trade-off solutions. This study proposed a multi-criteria decision-making method based on sensitivity analysis and analytic hierarchy process for building performance optimization, which provided architects with a real-time interactive way to handle the building's sustain-able design. After inputting the initial scheme and the expected performance goals, architects can modify the scheme according to the variable modification strategy recommended by the method and combine it with their preferences to improve the scheme's performance. Application of the proposed method to a case study of office building design in the China context was achieved. The results showed that the opti-mal solutions obtained with the help of the proposed method had better performance than those obtained without the method. Architects have also increased their design efficiency by 211.5%. The pro-posed method promotes the applicability of decision-making methods in building sustainable design and also provides a satisfactory method to support the improvement of building performance and also sus-tainability for modern cities.(c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.