Modelling techniques for capturing the socio-technical aspects of sustainability in post-occupancy stage of buildings

Research on the post-occupancy stage of buildings is receiving growing interest due to the need to significantly reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions and therefore make buildings more sustainable. The interrelationship between the building occupants (socio), the systems put in place (technical), and the building itself (technical) has added more pressure to this issue of sustainability. Building performance is therefore a function of many variables, each of which is important to analyse when carrying out post-occupancy evaluation. These variables are both „soft? and „hard?, interconnected, chaotic in nature, and difficult to understand, predict and keep under control. This research then carries out an extensive literature review of modelling techniques to capture, analyse and simulate the interrelationships among these socio-technical variables with a view to finding a suitable modelling tool to conceptualise the problem. The study identified actor network theory, agent-based modelling technique, bayesian belief network, configuration modelling, fuzzy logic, morphological analysis, social network analysis, and system dynamic as modelling techniques to capture the problem. The strength and limitations of each of the techniques are discussed. The paper concludes that system dynamics modelling tool seems to be more placed in capturing the behaviour of the variables in play.