Multicriteria ranking tool

Increased renovation rate and energy efficient buildings are important goals in EU countries. Starting a renovation process and making good technical and economic decisions can be challenging. Use of guided choices, comprehensive deep renovation packages, and prefabricated solutions might ease this process.

The multi-criteria ranking tool represents one of the core pieces of 4RinEU. As an early step in the decision process, it is aimed at building owners and investors, guiding them to narrow down their initial ideas about deep renovation of their building.

The development of the tool is done in close collaboration between 4RinEU partners SINTEF, Eurac Research, AIGUASOL. This work is performed in parallel with and using insights from the 4RinEU demonstration cases in 3 different European geo-clusters.

In addition to identifying suitable renovation packages, European experts have defined typical building archetypes for the different regions, with a potential for major energy savings. During the past months, the scope and functionality of the tool were structured and indicators valuable for the users defined.

Based on a selection of suitable renovation packages for their region and building, the tool will take building owners through several steps. With focus on typical energy savings potential and building place / construction impact, it will cursorily assemble indicators from five areas: economics and financial aspects, energy, environment, construction management, comfort and health of the building’s users.

In addition, the tool will give advice on typical failures that may occur with the analysed concepts during different project stages – construction, early usage and remaining lifetime. Taking into account failure risks and the ensuing costs, it expands traditional economic considerations of lifetime costing with assessments of uncertainty.

Information on financial instruments available for the single choices and the effect of these instruments on the project’s economics may ease the decision on embarking on a deep renovation project.

This way, the multicriteria ranking tool can help building owners to see advantages and disadvantages of the single suggestions, set them up against each other and identify a solution with a good trade-off according to their own preferences.