Decision Support Toolkit (DST) - a step towards an Integrated Platform for Performance Based Building (PBB)

The additional Performance Based Building (PeBBu) Thematic Network task on decision support toolkit (DST) has reached its final stage. PeBBu aims at combining fragmented knowledge in the area of Performance Based Building in order to build a systematic approach towards innovation of the building industry and applying user requirements throughout the building process. End-users, policy makers, building industry and regulatory communities are closely involved in this development in order to facilitate dissemination and implementation of research results. The objective of PeBBu DST task was to collect promising decision support tools into a toolkit and to test the most promising ones in selected PeBBu Domains. This paper represents the DST content, sums up the testing results from and summarises key findings from passionate discussions amongst different performance based building experts. The task included successful test sessions in October at Delft and in November at Porto facilitated by VTT Building and Transport (Finland) and University of Reading (U.K.). They outlined future PBB development needs in the industry and in different customer segments. The problems of the construction and real estate cluster have been pointed out to be insufficient customer orientation and on this matter PBB offers extremely promising foundation. The most challenging part of the task, outlining the future development directions for PeBBu, is finally introduced as a PBB Framework describing present stage, next steps and future challenges.