Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to propose a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) method focused on building maintenance and then to test it on two different sets of residential buildings. The paper’s three main goals are: to obtain useful data for optimizing the buildings’ maintenance plans; to search for any correlation between the occupants’ characteristics and their expectations toward the building; to study the occupants’ willingness to pay for maintenance procedures, as well as its correlation with the occupants’ perception of the elements source of maintenance (ESM). The proposed POE method for building maintenance performance evaluation (BMPE) consists of six main stages, focusing on the occupants’ opinions and their correlation with the facility manager’s. The observed case studies allowed for a preliminary validation of the POE method for BMPE. Results generically endorsed the method as a valuable tool for the rapprochement between facility management and the building’s end-users. Such findings could allow facility managers to develop more efficient maintenance plans focusing on the occupants’ real needs and expectations, raising occupant satisfaction levels and contributing to the building’s general performance.
Highlights
A building’s lifecycle can be divided into five main stages: planning, design, construction, use and end of life [1], each with its own evaluation process
Unlike other kinds of building evaluations, which focus mainly on aesthetical factors, constructed systems or materials performance, Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) concentrates on the evaluation of the building in order to juxtapose it to the occupants’ comfort and needs [3]
Spanning through an array of fields and professions [4], POE was first introduced in the 1960s, and was first applied to large governmental services buildings [5]
Summary
A building’s lifecycle can be divided into five main stages: planning, design, construction, use and end of life [1], each with its own evaluation process. Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) aims exclusively at the use stage of the building’s lifecycle, and has been defined as the examination of the effectiveness for human users of the occupied built environment [2]. POE focuses on the occupants’ assessment as a tool for the diagnosis of existing problems in the building’s performance, as well as benchmarking for future reference [5]. Most of the POE studies applied to residential buildings focused on energy use, indoor space distribution, occupant behavior, and overall satisfaction [7]. According to Zimring and Reizenstein [2], there are three dimensions to Buildings 2016, 6, 45; doi:10.3390/buildings6040045 www.mdpi.com/journal/buildings
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