An AHP experiment with the smart readiness indicator applied in a local reality

This paper describes an experiment intended to evaluate the appropriateness of the weighting scheme used to compute the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI), an index introduced by the European Commission and Parliament with the double aim to measure the “intelligence” of a building and to encourage the adoption of smart technologies in both new buildings and existing constructions to be retrofitted. This index is based on a hierarchical scheme including criteria related to energy savings and flexibility as well as to the comfort, convenience and wellbeing of the building occupants. In particular, the weights to assign to the criteria related to the needs of the occupants are largely subjective, and the technical support group established by the European Commission to draw up the SRI scheme did not find any scientific evidence to differentiate them, so all of them received equal weights. Exploiting Saaty’s Analysis of the Hierarchical Process (AHP), we involved a local group of engineers, architects, technicians and administrators to obtain cardinal rankings for these criteria. The results are likely to depend on the local context where our inquiry has been conducted, central Italy, but also show that the opinions of our experts are diverse, even within professionally homogeneous subgroups, and do not justify the equal-weight choice made by the technical support group. Our results can also constitute one of the many expected local contributions to the revision of the present SRI scheme.