Applying LCA and fuzzy AHP to evaluate building energy conservation

Reducing energy consumption and environment pollution is an important part in energy sustainability. Building energy conservation evaluation will drive the application of the new energy conservation technology. For building an energy conservation evaluation, energy conservation and environment impacts in all stages of the life cycle should be assessed. In this paper, the fuzzy analytic hierarchical process method and life-cycle assessment theory are adopted for building energy conservation evaluation. Factors in different hierarchies are weighted with linguistic variables by pair-wise comparisons, and factors in the lowest hierarchy within the different second hierarchy factors are also evaluated by linguistic variables. The membership degrees and integrated evaluation values are calculated. Then an example is studied to illustrate the proposed approach. The validity of the proposed method is verified and it demonstrates the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed approach. The results provide guidance in evaluating building energy conservation and determining the energy conservation grade of the building.