Non-domestic building stock energy and carbon modelling for policy advice - A user requirements survey

In recent years, many building stock models have been developed to advise and guide policymakers. In most models, however, user needs were not formally established. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to formally undertake a user needs'assessment for building stock energy and carbon models. To achieve this aim, a bilingual exploratory online user requirements' survey was developed. The survey was designed to gather information in the following areas: the general interests of the potential model users; their experiences with related studies and models; the desired properties of non-domestic building stock energy models; and any technical limitations, such as computational resources. A total of 19 responses were obtained. Users favour tools which are: usable, transparent; flexible; compatible with other tools; and provide clear, understandable results.