Towards Sustainability in Buildings: An User-Friendly Method to Select Building Components and Services and to Assess their Performances

With reference to the sustainability of buildings and building stock, the paper introduces an innovative user-friendly procedure to support designers in assessing building components and services, fulfilling specific performance requirements. Such a procedure has been developed by the Authors within a research program sponsored by the Region of Lombardy and coordinated by the Milan Polytechnic Foundation together with CIS-E-Milan. It is intended to be applied to newly designed and to existing buildings as well and it uses the following indicators as a support: (1) technological/technical quality; (2) environmental sustainability; (3) energy performance; (4) engineering design; (5) operational quality. In addition, the benefit-cost ratio has been explored by the mean of the so-called Profit Index.