The Methodology for Designing Residential Buildings with a Positive Energy Balance—General Approach

This a presents an original methodology for designing residential buildings with a positive energy balance. This process is an extremely complex undertaking. So far, no methodology with an open set of decision criteria has been developed that would include the modeling of the decisionmaker’s preferences using statistical surveys of a group of decisionmakers for this purpose. There is also no methodology relating to the interdependence of decision criteria. The present paper presents an original methodology consisting of five stages. The prepared algorithm indicates the need for changes in the classic design of residential buildings, taking into account the decision criteria that show interdependence. The proposed methodology consists in combining three methods of multi-criteria decision support: the DEMATEL method, used to determine the relations between decision criteria; the AHP/ANP method, used to build a model of the decisionmaker’s preferences, and the TOPSIS method, used to create a ranking of permissible and acceptable variants of solutions. The tool, i.e., the DEMATEL method, fulfills the expected function and enables the identification of the relations between the criteria and sub-criteria of evaluation. The AHP/ANP method fulfills the expected function and enables the ranking of evaluation criteria and sub-criteria.