Abstract
With the rapid development of the construction industry, buildings have become the single largest consumer of energy in the world. The retrofitting of existing buildings offers an excellent opportunity to reduce global energy consumption and promote sustainable development. As the retrofit strategy determines the success of the retrofitting process, this paper proposes a decision support framework for retrofitting that integrates the building information modeling (BIM) with large-scale group decision-making, which is a new application of digital technology to the retrofitting of existing buildings. Within this framework, BIM provides massive geometric and non-geometric data for the multi-criteria large-scale group decision-making process. Taking into account the needs of various stakeholder groups and sustainable principle, we establish a comprehensive and innovative evaluation index system for community retrofitting, and use the group best-worst method to determine the criteria weights. The stakeholers evaluate alternative retrofit strategies through distribution linguistic preferences, with a consistency-driven optimization model used to personalize the stakeholers’ numerical evaluation scales. Through k-means clustering and the consensus-reaching process, combined with objective data from BIM, we obtain the ranking of the alternative strategies. Finally, we apply the abovementioned decision support framework to the retrofitting of the Suifeng Garden community in China to demonstrate the rationality and superiority of the proposed approach.
•We propose a building information modeling (BIM)-aided large-scale group decision-making framework.•We evaluate the weights of diverse stakeholder groups in terms of power, legitimacy, and urgency.•We integrate k-means clustering and multi-objective optimization models for consensus reaching process.•We establish a comprehensive evaluation criteria system for community retrofitting.