ABSTRACT
Given the current climate emergency, it is already well-known that retrofitting interventions on existing buildings should be aimed not only at reducing their operational energy consumption, but also at improving their seismic performance. Indeed, the environmental impact of repair and retrofitting activities after strong earthquakes, or other hazardous events, cannot be overlooked, especially in regions with high seismic hazard. Several multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches are available in the literature for the identification of optimal retrofitting solutions for buildings. Such methods typically consider a range of economic, social, and technical aspects that are assumed to be of interest to decision-makers (e.g. duration of works, architectural impact, need for specialised workers, etc.), however, the importance of including environmental indicators among the relevant decisional variables has been only recently explored. The present study shows the application to a case-study building of two alternative MCDM approaches (i.e. those recently developed by Caruso et al., 2021, and Clemett et al., 2023) for identification of optimal retrofitting strategies, accounting for energy efficiency and related environmental impacts. The main differences between the approaches are highlighted and discussed, in terms of considered decision-making parameters and corresponding weights, rankings of retrofitting options and identification of optimal retrofitting strategies.
