Operationalising multi-attribute decision-making in a novel decision support system to help social landlords reduce energy demand, fuel poverty and carbon

This research aims to develop an interactive decision support system (DSS) to help social landlords make shared decisions about how best to retrofit a home and reduce fuel poverty. The DSS will be an interactive tool used to guide the retrofit design process. The DSS will be used by retrofit teams in social landlords to make shared decisions with residents and retrofit coordinators about which energy efficiency measures are most appropriate for the home and its residents. The DSS will empower these stakeholders with actionable data about the performance of different combinations of retrofit technologies, providing visibility to different performance attributes. This will include relevant performance measures that are commonly used in the retrofit decision-making process, such as energy bills, carbon emissions and thermal comfort.

The DSS supports rather than replaces decision makers and will be appropriate for use in a workshop or consultation environment that brings these different stakeholders together. To indicate the right combination of energy efficiency measures, a screening survey will be used to collect the preferences of each stakeholder based on how they prioritise different performance attributes. Multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) methods will then be used to balance competing preferences and weight the performance of different combinations of measures.

Where the DSS will innovate is in incorporating fuel poverty as one of these performance attributes. The DSS will deal with the three factors known to determine fuel poverty: energy efficiency, energy affordability and household income plus residents’ vulnerability (Boardman 1991). Specifically, fuel poverty will be represented in terms of the affordability of providing adequate energy services for residents having assessed their individual needs. Prior to the methodological framework and user requirements specification, some details about the DSS are unclear.

This includes the exact MADM method, but the viability of approaches such as Analytic Hierarchy Process and Additive Ratio Assessment methods will be evaluated. A detailed specification for the DSS will be developed to remove these ambiguities based on a survey of social landlords across the United Kingdom, to be launched in Autumn of this year.