Development of an expert system for evaluating the environmental quality of office buildings

Abstract

An office building is designed and built to host a group of people performing distinct office work. The performance of the users of such a building is substantially influenced by its environmental quality. Environmental Quality Factors (EQF) are lighting, acoustic, thermal and indoor air quality. The evaluation of environmental quality of such a building is an indication of how well this building achieves the environmental comfort for its users. This study addressed the evaluation of environmental quality of office buildings as an integrated approach (lighting, acoustic, thermal and indoor air quality). In this research, the performance criteria (variables) of EQF and the scales used for evaluating these performance criteria (attributes) were extracted from two main sources: The first by carrying out an extensive literature review through published papers, reports, books, etc. related to EQF. The second by conducting the interviews with 21 academicians and 29 practitioners who are considered experts in these areas in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A computerized unified program using Expert System for Environmental Quality Evaluation (ESEQE) of office buildings was developed simulating the methods that the domain experts used in office environment assessment. This computerized program correlated 100% with a hand worked solution.