Intelligent Multi-Criteria Decision Support for Renovation Solutions for a Building Based on Emotion Recognition by Applying the COPRAS Method and BIM Integration

Abstract

With accelerating climate change and the urgent need to cut carbon emissions, global focus has turned to the existing building stock and its renovation. Sustainable renovation helps to achieve better energy performance and gain wider sustainability benefits, such as increased value of a building, improved indoor and outdoor comfort, reduced carbon emissions, and the higher satisfaction and better emotional state of inhabitants. Numerous systems and tools have been developed worldwide to assist with decision making in the choice of preferred modernisation scenarios and alternatives. However, social aspects are often neglected in the existing systems, and emotions of inhabitants are rarely analysed. To close this gap, the present study proposes an innovative decision-making framework for sustainable renovation solutions, based on emotion recognition. The framework makes it possible to assess various renovation alternatives against sustainability criteria and real-time measurements of the emotional states of inhabitants. Based on the proposed framework, an intelligent multi-criteria decision support system was developed by integrating COPRAS and the facial action coding system, the method of automatic facial expression recognition, and the continuous calibration and participant methods. The system was tested in the case study of renovation solutions for a building located in Ukraine. The research results revealed that the proposed renovation solutions had a positive impact on the emotional state of inhabitants, especially when visual materials such as drawings were presented. Some case studies were analysed together with the application of decision system tools and building information modelling (BIM) subsystem integration as a multidiscipline application of various applied sciences for representation and data analysis. The authors of this research have been analysing human emotional, affective and physiological states for many years and collected over a billion of these data in Vilnius city during the H2020 ROCK, SAVAS and BIM4REN projects. Data acquired during measurements in Vilnius were used to determine correlations and trends for the case study. The proposed methodology and findings of the study can be useful for researchers who use the evaluation and analysis of human emotions when there is a need to choose appropriate renovation measures or find alternative solutions.