Information requirements for an occupant focused building performance evaluation system

Today's construction sector, building performance became an important criterion. Lately, in the design and construction of new buildings, architects, engineers and other authorities focus on building performance. There is an orientation towards energy efficiency in newly constructed facilities. On the other hand, the underperformer old structures due to high energy consumption are a known fact. Considering the fact that, a major part of the buildings which will be existing in the near future will be composed of the buildings which are already constructed today and among them office buildings are well-known with their high energy consumption and tendency to consume, any kind of retrofit action taken in office buildings will have an impact in respect to energy efficiency. The contributory and decisive data sources in term of retrofit decisions are comprised of expenditures of energy sources, data from the sensing devices and occupant feedbacks. There exist post occupancy evaluations (POE) which guide the decision makers about possible retrofit actions by showing the performance of the building dependent on the feedbacks collected by the building users. When the current post occupancy evaluations are analyzed, it is seen that the occupant satisfaction measurement parameters are not detailed enough so that the analysis remain at a superficial level; since the occupant feedback is not location based during further analysis of facility managers some of the location information is lost or not found; the level of analysis and the visualization of analysis results are not sufficient; integration of sensing devices to POE tools are relatively more common. Bearing in mind all the deficiencies stated above, an idea of occupant based post occupancy evaluation tool integrated with Building information Modelling (BIM) which has the location based occupant feedback and sensing device data is proposed. For the development of the suggested system, indoor localization technologies, occupant satisfaction parameters and complaints, information requirements which change dependent on the complaint type must be investigated and determined. In the scope of this master thesis, above-mentioned topics are searched and the information required for the development of the proposed occupant based post occupancy evaluation tool are gathered. First of all, in the literature review part of the master thesis, in order to gather previous works together and to have a better understanding of the topics, facility management, building performance evaluation and post occupancy evaluation; and in order to collect the location based occupant feedback with minimum effort and maximum precision indoor positioning technologies are searched. Secondly, as part of the field works, in order to determine occupant feedback/complaints and information that should be collected from occupants (required information)which must be present in the proposed building performance evaluation system, interviews with office users are done and use cases are created. Considering the complaints in the literature, in the light of office user interviews occupant complaints are compiled, and various information requirements are retrieved from the use cases. Because of the fact that the information which should be provided by the occupant changes depending on the complaint type, in order to determine which information requirements are needed for different complaints, occupant feedback/complaint vs. information requirements matrices are formed and filled in. The tables are given with the related explanations. Moreover, in order to create correct tables, occupant feedback/complaints vs. information requirements tables are validated by facility managers during the interviews. The oral and score based evaluations about the tables are gathered from the facility managers for both occupant feedback/complaints and information requirements. After the analysis of the facility manager interview results, tables are revised and taken its final form. The final versions of the tables are given with explanations. Lastly, in the light of all the information gathered the system architecture of the proposed building evaluation system is explained with its features on a vision diagram. In conclusion, the information researched and gathered in this master thesis, can be used for the development of future occupant focused building evaluation systems which has location-based occupant feedback, sensors data integrated within a BIM model and lastly coherent visual preface and various features which makes it easier and more efficient for the decision makers to take retrofit actions.