Health performance and cost management model for sustainable healthy buildings

Abstract

The construction industry is a flourishing business. Demand for ‘sustainable healthy buildings’ is rapidly increasing with the growing population. As the population increases, problems associated with health impacts of a building would also increase. Addressing the health problems of buildings could require raising of construction cost. In order to maintain a reasonable cost, a construction project might possibly have to compromise health performance and cost, which thus illustrates the major dilemmas being faced in the construction industry. Proper building health management is obligatory to reduce and control health problems and to maintain comfort levels throughout a building’s life cycle. To achieve this, a health performance evaluation model has been proposed to measure the level of health performance throughout a building’s life cycle. However, detail solutions of cost issues are not within scope of this paper. The objective of this paper is to propose a health performance and cost management model to achieve satisfactory health performance level within the project budget. The main significance of this model is to establish a decision-making process for decision-makers to improve and identify problems that could affect the health performance of a building throughout a building’s life cycle, thus allowing stakeholders to resolve shortcomings and to apply advanced solutions for building upgrade.