A stochastic approach for maximizing productive time by optimizing indoor environmental quality -

Abstract

Providing comfortable indoor environmental conditions that please most of building occupants is an essential goal of facility management. The relationship between building occupants’ productivity and their level of comfort at the workplace is well established. However, this truth is frequently disregarded when renovation projects are being studied, for it is easier to focus on the direct costs of a project than it is to assign the value of improved user health and productivity. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between building renovation decisions and occupants’ level of satisfaction with Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) at the workplace. The work entails developing an optimization-based framework to analyze the effect of potential building retrofit options on the improvement in IEQ conditions at the workplace, and in turn, on the level of productive time of building occupants. The framework takes into consideration the fluctuations in IEQ perception among different occupants’ groups and the corresponding levels of satisfaction. For example, subgroups of employees may be classified based on three main parameters: gender, type of office, and distance to a window. Based on these parameters, the proposed framework can be used to calculate the increase in the level of satisfaction of building occupants and consequently their productivity. The framework will then be used to develop a decision-making tool which helps select optimal retrofit options, using genetic algorithms, considering several user-defined constraints such as available budget and market conditions.