Incremental cost-benefit quantitative assessment of green building: A case study in China

Asa resource-saving and environment-friendly building form, the green building aims to provide occupants with an ecological and humanistic living space. To promote the popularity of green buildings in the construction industry, effective incremental cost-benefit evaluation is an essential prerequisite. However, miscellaneous elements and fuzzy evaluation criteria often make challenges for accurate evaluation. Further, the fluctuation of incremental cost-benefit elements in the whole life cycle of green buildings also limits the applicability of static evaluation methods. To address these limitations, this study proposes to identify the elements of incremental costs and incremental benefits on the premise of extracting the phase characteristics. Simultaneously, we also introduced the concept of production efficiency (PE) in the manufacturing industry and developed the BCC model through data envelopment analysis (DEA) to quantitatively evaluate the PE of green building. Finally, six green buildings in China are taken as cases to implement the quantitative evaluation of PE. The results show that the divergence of PE mainly comes from the personalized configuration of various elements. Moreover, the PE is floating due to the influence of "input-output" balance adjustment in the whole life cycle. This study is a dynamic prediction of green building efficiency and provides suggestions for practitioners to reconstruct the allocation of project resources.