A Holistic Assessment Framework for Evaluating Buildings’ Green and Digital Readiness Level

Smart buildings assessment methodologies are important tools utilized across all stages of transitioning towards a greener, smarter, and energy-efficient building sector. Existing assessment methods either focus only on specific building aspects, or consider buildings with particular technical characteristics, or require explicit technical knowledge by the users to evaluate building performance. Consequently, this paper proposes a holistic and flexible assessment framework that encompasses all facets of a building, including green factor, energy efficiency, occupants' comfort, and digitization levels. The proposed framework does not require strong technical knowhow to perform the assessment and can be generally applied for evaluating different buildings by providing basic information about their main characteristics. The assessment framework was applied to a real commercial building, demonstrating its effective use in evaluating overall building performance and analyzing the score in each individual impact category or domain. In addition, two potential action plans were formulated by utilizing the proposed framework to explore different pathways for enhancing the building’s performance.