STUBE  Research Project

towards Systematic Treatment of Uncertainty in Building Eco-design tools

Group : Reliability Engineering and Decision-Making tools

Labelling: none

Duration: 48 months

Funding: ANR JCJC

Staff involved from LARIS: Marie-Lise Pannier, David Bigaud, Thierry Lemenand, 1 PhD to be recruited

Project partners: CEES de Mines Paris ; HEIG-VD

Abstract

The environmental impacts of the building sector can be reduced by applying eco-design tools to new projects or renovations. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a holistic method for evaluating the impact of a product throughout its life cycle, and is particularly well suited to be applied to buildings. However, there are many sources of uncertainty on the environmental modelling, which could modify the choice of design alternatives. The use of statistical methods to deal with these uncertainties, such as uncertainty analysis (UA) and sensitivity analysis (SA), is essential to increase confidence in LCA and strenghen the decision-making support provided by eco-design tools. However, these methods are still not widely used. There are numerous scientific and technical barriers to overcome in order to make the treatment of uncertainties in building LCA tools both operational (simple, rapid and comprehensible) and systematic. The STUBE project aims to tackle some of these obstacles. To this end, a methodological framework integrating UA and SA will be developed, and appropriate visualisation methods will be proposed. Based on previous work, the project will be divided into three parts. In the first part, the data needed to quantify uncertainties will be collected and the sources of uncertainty to be integrated for different types of study will be identified. In the second part, the aim will be to help choosing UA and SA able capable of dealing with different sources of uncertainty, to assess the effect of uncertainties when comparing alternatives and to evaluate the robustness of the results. Finally, visualisation tools will be proposed to facilitate the interpretation of uncertain results.