Evaluating and ranking energy performance of office buildings using Grey relational analysis

Traditional methods of evaluating energy performance of building tend to focus on comparing the observed energy consumption with the average value of energy consumption by regression method or theoretical value calculated by simulation analysis. For evaluating and ranking the energy performance of buildings, this paper proposed a perspective of multiple objective outputs to evaluate the energy performance of buildings and then use a multiple attribute decision-making approach, Grey relational analysis (GRA), to rank the evaluated buildings. The energy performance of 47 office buildings in Taiwan were evaluated and ranked to serve as a case study to illustrate the procedure and effectiveness of the proposed approach. ► For evaluating and ranking the energy performance of buildings, this paper uses Grey relational analysis to rank the evaluated buildings. ► This paper adopted Grey relational analysis to deal with inter-relationships between multiple factors and uncertain information for energy using of buildings. ► The energy performance of 47 office buildings in Taiwan were evaluated and ranked to serve as a case study to illustrate the proposed approach. ► The results of Grey relational analysis are compared with that of fuzzy measure and fuzzy integral. ► The results of these two methods are close but with minor difference.