Management of user and stakeholder interests in multi criteria assessments

Individual user and stakeholder interests in the context of project requirements and goals often lead to trade-offs; especially during the early design stage of a building. Investors for example strive to achieve a maximum sustainability assessment score on the one hand and optimized initial costs on the other. Users often prefer good indoor environment conditions and low operating costs. A systematic approach is called for in order to achieve both, a high level of stakeholder satisfaction on the one hand and a high performance in the context of sustainability-assessment on the other. We applied a new approach linking building assessment and network analysis based on the Austrian building assessment system (ÖGNI/DGNB) and using a reference project of a public office building in Austria. Giving full consideration to the individual user and stakeholder goals the determination of sustainability performance is carried out by scenario analysis taking into account criteria interdependency. Depending on the investigated scenarios for improvement representing stakeholder influence, the results indicate an optimization potential of ÖGNI/DGNB target achievement between 1.3 and 5.2%. Systemic influence caused by different optimization strategies on single assessment criteria is an important aspect for the sustainability improvement of buildings. Arising as a result of system trade-offs, inappropriate optimization scenarios – induced by users and stakeholder goals – improve the instantaneously assessed criterion but simultaneously these can lower overall building sustainability. A balanced improvement of all assessment areas is thus indispensable to ensure a high assessment level already in early planning stages and furthermore to achieve stakeholder satisfaction.