Purpose – This research paper is a literature review of the existing building retrofitting process. It proposes studying the functional, technical, and organizational issues of the green retrofit process. The purpose of this paper is to expand the domain of design framework for retrofitting existing buildings. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a review of the model-based design process from enrollment to evaluation stages representing the green retrofitting process in selected publications. The paper opted to review the Green Retrofit Design (GRD) process model for achieving a systematic design model of GRD development in the future. Findings – Functional and maintenance issues are mainly for new buildings, also in the field for renovation and demolishing. Publications also show that environmental, social, and technical issues are often examined separately in the decision process of GRD. Papers in the facility management scale would concentrate more on organization/legal issues. Publications with questionnaire design are devoted to the usage on life-cycle assessment on existing building, but not yet on the stakeholder management and design process and related issues. Social implications – The achievement of the study is to provide a new framework of design approach that is significant to the theoretical research, education, communication, and practical works in terms of GRD development. Originality/value – The paper not only achieves a specific sequence of practical approaches, including awareness of problems, conceptual development, and design embodiment, to meet design objectives, but also conforms to academic practice-based research of creative design taking on GRD practice.

This study critically reviews multi-agent systems (MAS) in construction. Given their autonomous, cooperative, and learning attributes, MAS are a promising approach to address the essential problems of "collaboration and consensus" among stakeholders in construction projects. Despite the development of many agent-based technologies and applications in recent years, relatively few reviews have been reported on this area. Based on selected papers, this study proposes a novel framework of MAS in construction. It focuses on collaboration and consensus in construction projects, and comprehensively organizes three dimensions of MAS, namely "application-issue-attribute". Based on this framework, the applications and issues in construction domain can be facilitated with appropriate attributes of MAS, and it can also help find the potential applications of MAS in construction. Furthermore, this study clarifies the advantages of MAS and support collaboration and consensus in construction domain. Finally, the development of MAS in construction is presented, and future research directions are recommended.

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Green retrofit design (GRD) has two major aims, which are to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions in existing buildings that are to be sustainably retrofitted. The gap between architects and engineers is evident at the pre-design stage as architects understand little about energy models while engineers use them to conserve energy. However, the goal for both architects and engineers is to develop sustainable building forms that are sensitive to the environment and conserve energy. This paper presents the current technology development for GRD and provides a decision support model to help architects get involved in reducing carbon emissions at the pre-design stage. The GRD process is demonstrated and discussed from the aspect of retrofitting a commercial building and different standards used to verify the results. The aim of this research is to provide a decision making framework for architects to use at the pre-design stage so as to enhance GRD energy conservation, and thereby contribute to the goal of sustainability. Building information modeling (BIM) inter-operability is also discussed as part of the technology development trend.

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