ABSTRACT
A central, fundamental challenge within the renovation field is handling enormous complexity, both at the level of an individual building project (consisting thousands of building components that are amenable to renovation, i.e. effectively managing the combinatorial explosion of renovation decisions) and at the AECO-community level of knowledge about what renovation options are available today, and how each such renovation alternative impacts criteria (i.e. energy efficiency, indoor comfort, spatial quality etc.). The aim of this paper is to present an innovative approach for addressing these challenges by developing a Renovation Domain Model: a formal (logic-based) domain-specific language for expressing and capturing key concepts for renovation alternatives, which is derived from empirical information. The domain model provides a structured, direct, and formal way of expressing an extensive set of renovation alternatives as a renovation “knowledge base”, to manage the complexity of decision problems regarding the selection and use of various renovation alternatives.
