Rating or ranking techniques are often used for checking compliance with regulations, evaluating the efficiency of a retrofit, or even labelling a building. However, the building is, in most cases, rated on very few parameters - when not only one - among many building qualities that should be taken into account. Within the frame of the Joule-Therrnie OFFICE project, a multicriteria ranking methodology, based on the ELECTRE family algorithms, is being developed.

This paper describes the methodology used in the Design and Evaluation Group in the project OFFICE - Passive Retrofitting of Office Buildings to Improve their Energy Performance and Indoor Working Conditions' funded by the European Commission under the JOULE III Programme. The objectives of the OFFICE project are to promote passive solar and energy efficient retrofitting measures in office buildings.

OFFICE is a research project partly funded by the CEC dealing with the passive retrofitting of office buildings to improve their energy performance and indoor working conditions. The project is coordinated by the University of Athens with the participation of organizations and research institutes from eight European countries. The aim of the project is to develop global retrofitting strategies, tools and design guidelines in order to promote successful and cost effective implementation of passive solar and energy efficient retrofitting measures to office buildings.

This project has studied a selection of 16 typical museums for antiquities in five Mediterranean countries and was partly funded by the JOULE III of the European Commission DG XII. Through an elaborate analysis and complete refurbishment of the Archaeological Museum of Delphi, the programme has provided an example for an innovative museum design based on present-day know-how.        

 This study is aimed to spread the intelligent design tool of ventilation in buildings and to improve indoor air quality (IAQ) in rooms. This paper describes two prototypes for diagnosing IAQ and ventilation calculation in rooms, by utilizing the technology of artificial intelligence, such as ES (Expert System), in which the data concerning ventilation design are summarized and the knowledge is presented in the form of production rule.

During a field study of the thermal comfort of workers in natural ventilated office buildings in Oxford and Aberdeen, UK, we.re carried out which included information about use of building controls. The data was analysed to explore the effect the outdoor temperature has on the indoor temperature and how this is effected by occupants' use of environmental controls during the peak summer (June, July and August).

In this paper, we are particularly interested in the automatic generation of zonal model. We show how a. program can deduce with expert rules a partitioning suitable for the main driving flows encountered in the room under study and how appropriated local model are chosen and connected each other. To illustrate our purpose, we solve the case of a ventilated bi dimensional cavity.

This paper presents an analysis of the emission of chemical compounds and their diffusion in a room by the technique of computational fluid dynamics. A polypropylene styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) plate was chosen as the TVOC emission source. The emission rate and room-averaged concentration are analyzed under various conditions of ventilation rate and temperature. Further, the concentration distribution of TVOC within a room is also examined and evaluated from the viewpoint of ventilation efficiency.

Until now, there is no widely accepted way to express any index for this purpose and taking into account the large variety of possible pollutants. Things can be simplified if the aim is to compare different systems and strategies rather than to give an absolute value of quality. For the study of a pollutant source, the main important point for comparison is the pattern of its production, whatever this pollutant is. The detailed data for each inhabitant is the curve of the number of hours above a pollutant level concentration Ci: Nh (Ci).

Recent research suggests that fine-particulate air pollution increases the incidence of lung disease and pre-mature death. Single fibre filter theory is used to predict the theoretical particulate collection efficiency of air permeable walls (dynamic insulation). The relationship between particle diameter and filtration efficiency for dynamic insulation, as a function of flow rate, is examined and compared to that for a conventional filter.