Multicriteria evaluation of alternatives for remote monitoring systems of municipal buildings

• Multiple criteria analysis of remote monitoring systems for municipal buildings.
• Development of criteria hierarchy to evaluate and compare monitoring systems.
• Extension of SMAA-2 multicriteria method to handle a criteria hierarchy.
• One of the municipalities has started to implement the recommended system.

Conservation of natural resources drives municipalities to monitor their heat, power and water consumption more accurately. The objective of this study was to evaluate different implementation possibilities for remote monitoring systems for the municipal buildings of two medium-sized municipalities, Hollola and Nastola in Southern Finland. Four different alternatives were considered: (1) a system by an external service provider, (2) a system provided by the local energy distribution company, (3) a system built by the municipalities themselves, and (4) using the current manual system but with more frequent data collection. The alternatives were evaluated in terms of multiple functional, operational, and economical criteria and compared considering different preferences for the criteria. Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) was used in comparing the alternatives. SMAA is a method for aiding multicriteria group decision-making in problems where both criteria measurements and decision makers’ preferences are uncertain, imprecise or partially missing. The analysis resulted in recommending the remote monitoring system by an external service provider.