Assessment of Building Performance Using Computational Intelligence: Focus on the Disabled and Elderly

Abstract

The care for the elderly and people with disability increasingly demand more ingenuity to undertake, especially as it relates to the built environment. The impact of the physical environment on health has been widely documented. The knowledge of the special needs/preferences of this vulnerable group of users (people suffering from Alzheimer, autism, dementia and other similar disabilities), for the purpose building of performance evaluation and subsequent improvements is essential. The challenge is that their conditions, as exemplified by the loss or impairment of their capacity to provide accurate/realistic information of their building attributes' perceptions and preferences, make such knowledge inaccurate to serve as basis for building improvements and designs. This paper seeks to provide a scientific means for obtaining more accurate knowledge, which when obtained normally can be misleading and non representational of reality. The method adopted for this study is fuzzy-neural-network computation, a branch of computational intelligence, to develop an all-encompassing knowledge based building performance assessment model.