A green home decision-making tool: Sustainability assessment for homeowners

Homeowners, the largest group of stakeholder in the building sector, are often under-served and suffer from difficulty in pursuing a green home. Few sustainability assessments and decision-making tools have been created for nonprofessionals. This research adopted a design science method to create an integrated path for green renovation to make it easy for homeowners to make sustainable renovation decisions. A tool named SWAHO (Sustainability Weighting Assessment for Homeowners) plays a central role in the proposed path for green renovation. SWAHO enables tradeoffs among renovation actions based on the homeowner's perception of sustainability. The conceptual model of SWAHO integrates all the tasks of a green renovation, from decisions on renovation actions to ordering products. A prototype of SWAHO was developed that considers 48 renovation actions and 12 sustainability criteria, and a knapsack problem technique was used to optimize solutions. Prototype testing, through surveys, user interviews, and internal consistency checks, showed that SWAHO provides a useful approach for supporting green renovation actions by homeowners.