Accelerating the Transition to Green Building Neighbourhoods: A New Decision Support Platform

Abstract

Green Building Neighbourhoods (GBNs) foster sustainable, accessible, low‐carbon living through shared energy, green mobility, and social cohesion. Steering a neighbourhood towards GBN status faces hurdles in governance, financing, citizen engagement, technological innovation, and accessible tools. Current rapidly evolving digital technologies, such as BIM and Digital Twins, accelerate this transition by offering real-time tracking and visibility, fostering better coordination among stakeholders and facilitating early issue detection. The emerging advanced decision intelligence and digital decisioning platforms incorporate artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and large datasets. This integration enables automation, optimisation, and the consistent delivery of data-driven decisions across various ecosystems. We report on the development of a novel Decision Support Platform (DSP) within the EU H2020 PROBONO project. The PROBONO DSP is iteratively tested in six “Living Labs” in Madrid, Dublin, Brussels, Aarhus, Porto, and Prague, each at different life‐cycle stages and seeking to address themes such as energy, emissions, mobility, and health. Key functionality includes digitalizing social values in BIM, large‐scale scenario sampling, thermal‐comfort simulation and monitoring, mobility benchmarking, anomaly detection, and energy‐investment comparison. Deployment in the Living Labs has enhanced information sharing, ideation, and stakeholder discussion through concise overviews and tailored recommendations. Modular integration has enabled emergent features.