A survey on energy performance of the non-residential public building stock in Southern Italy; toward a decision support tool for refurbishment actions

Abstract

The public buildings sector represents one of the most intensive items of EU energy consumption; the application of retrofit solutions in existing buildings is a crucial way to reduce its impact. To facilitate the knowledge of the energy performance of the existing non-residential buildings and the choice of the more adequate actions, Public Administrations (PA) should have the availability of proper tools. Within the Italian project “POI 2007-13”, a database and a decision support tool, for easy use, even to a non-technical user, have been developed. A large set of data, obtained from the energy audits of 151 existing public buildings located in four regions of South of Italy have been analysed, elaborated and organized in a database. This has been used to identify the best architectures of two ANNs and to train them. The first ANN provides the actual energy performance of any building; the second ANN assesses key economic indicators. A decision support tool, based on the use of these ANNs is conceived for a fast prediction of the energy performance of buildings and for a first selection of energy retrofit actions, which can be applied.