Abstract
Aquatic Centres (ACs) in cold regions, serving thousands of visitors year-round, strive to achieve sustainability of their complex processes, e.g., safe indoor environment, water and energy efficiency, and customer satisfaction. In the absence of a structured performance benchmarking process, the facility management functions with no impetus for improving the performance of these components. A performance benchmarking model using a multilevel approach is developed to infer the performance of the key components for improving the sustainability performance of ACs. The bottom-up approach aggregated the scores of sixty-three performance indicators (PIs) using Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) to generate the performance indices for the seven key components. Sensitivity analysis identified the indicators with a significant contribution to the component's performance. Application of the model on five facilities operating in the province of British Columbia (BC) (Canada) provides a starting point towards sustainability of ACs. The results showed that two of the ACs (i.e., AC2 and AC5) outperforms the remaining participating centers. However, all the participating centres need to improve almost all of their key-components, with a particular focus on energy efficiency and socio-economic stability. The developed model provides assistance in decision-making at different levels of the ACs’ organizational hierarchy. This model holistically covers all the processes (e.g., water and air quality) and operations (e.g., energy, personnel, and customers) and will help the ACs in achieving 21st-century sustainable development initiatives in cold regions.