Science AI Journal
Engineering · Research topic

Open research questions in Sustainable Building Design and Assessment

43 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 849 Sustainable Building Design and Assessment papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • The structural model presented in this paper creates a conceptual framework for methodically translating strategic sustainability goals into technical product development. The presented approach, “Design for R,” interprets R-strategies as operable target variables in the sense of the DfX paradigm, thereby addressing a central research gap: the previously insufficient methodological connection between sustainability principles and product-oriented design. This paper outlines the methodological foundation and structure of the research project based on DRM. The model presented formulates central elements of a DfR framework, describes methodological and content-related work packages, and thus lays the foundation for the further development of a compatible and practically applicable design approach. At the same time, the conceptual nature of this work is linked to open questions. The theoretical foundations are deliberately understood as a structuring foundation, not as a final solution. The concrete elaboration of their verification and validation, and their practical implementation in tools and applications are still pending and constitute the next steps within the research project. The framework’s requirements will be systematically identified through targeted the framework elements, 1598 DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABILITY analyses in industry, science, and education. In industrial contexts, these analyses focus on examining the applicability and integration of the DfR framework within existing product development processes and decision-making structures. In research and educational settings, the emphasis lies on assessing conceptual clarity, methodological usefulness, and didactic suitability, rather than on quantitative performance evaluation. This will lead to the development of methodological concepts, specific tools, and actionable recommendations for practical application in real development contexts. The development of digitally supported tools, the exemplary application of the approach in industry, research, and education-related use cases, and the development of formats for teaching and training, as outlined in (Thelemann et al., 2026), are also planned. This development process is iterative so that feedback and application experiences can be systematically incorporated into further development, also with a view to previously underrepresented sustainability dimensions such as social or systemic aspects. At the same time, the structural model presented is also being continuously developed. It forms the methodological basis for the entire research project, but is to be flexibly adapted to new findings, needs, and technological developments. This creates a dynamic orientation that supports both the continuous development of the DfR framework and its integration into future scientific and practical contexts.

    Operationalising sustainability in engineering design – towards a methodological framework for design for R · 2026 · DOI

  • Future work will focus on the integration of constraints to reduce infeasible regions and filter technically, economically or contextually unrealistic options. Future research will investigate how Desing Space Exploration and Design by Shopping paradigm can be operationalized through proposed morphological chart, enabling exploration of alternative config- urations and strengthen collaborative design processes in complex energy transition contexts.

    Set-based design approach for renewable energy integration in social housing: design space mapping with a morphological chart · 2026 · DOI

  • investor evidence the empirical and should enhance operational relevance of this framework. Initially, validation with real transaction data and across various building types is essential to enhance external validity and assess the robustness of ESG market adjustments across regions and sectors. Future work could incorporate hedonic pricing models, panel transaction to empirically estimate ESG data, or premiums and brown discounts, rather than treating them as fixed scenario parameters. Additionally, some of the simplifying assumptions in this study could be improved by using dynamic or stochastic models. Introducing variable energy price trends, different discount rates, and uncertainty-based simulations would better reflect long-term market and transition risks. Moreover, extending include retrofit strategies for existing buildings—especially in aging markets like Italy—would be valuable. Energy retrofit scenarios could help balance higher initial costs against long-term benefits, including reduced lifecycle costs, improved environmental performance, ESG value growth, and reduced obsolescence. Recent research emphasizes the importance of evaluating retrofit options and economic analyses. Lastly, further research should examine the and economic performance, particularly how energy-efficiency measures affect both LCA and LCC while maintaining their conceptual double-counting during valuation. connections between environmental environmental framework distinction combined avoiding lifecycle through and the to Overall, the findings illustrate how circular economy principles can be systematically integrated into real estate valuation through a lifecycle structured, framework.

    Integrating circular economy principles into real estate valuation: a lifecycle-based framework combining LCA and LCC · 2026 · DOI

  • However, it has attracted limited research, and this underpins this works’ motivation for the exploration of the perspectives of real estate stakeholders relating to the uptake and use of GRESB.

    Insights into the use of GRESB as an ESG benchmarking tool · 2025 · DOI

  • Additionally, we applied the 0–100 EoL allocation method and the CML 2001 baseline methodology for LCIA; as different methodologies may yield varying results, future work could examine how these methodological choices influence outcomes. Due to our focus on material circularity, the LCA in this study did not account for impacts from operational energy and water use (B5, B7) or the deconstruction phase (C1).

    From circularity to sustainability: Advancing the whole building circularity indicator with Life Cycle Assessment (WBCI-LCA) · 2024 · DOI

  • Therefore, the researcher has adopted a set of standards that simulate the burning environment and in an open questionnaire whose outputs have turned into a closed questionnaire to include a group of specialized experts to reach the importance of organizing these standards to be part of the Iraqi construction…

    Bordering a set of energy criteria for the contributing in the transition level to sustainable energy in electrical Iraqi Projects · 2020 · DOI

  • Despite the attention sustainability-related urban measurement and assessment methods have received it is still not well understood how accurate (or not) the various methods are; their limitations in holistic city performance assessment; or, how they can be effectively used to better the design of the urban environment, city services and policies.

    Improving city-scale measures of livable sustainability: A study of urban measurement and assessment through application to the city of Birmingham, UK · 2017 · DOI

  • While current project management techniques are well defined in terms of content and process to manage the budget-scope-time constraint, availability of organization resources and ability to adopt project governance strategies in a changing business environment, like incorporating sustainability in business process is ambiguous, literature has not explored how to cope with a normative situation like sustainability.

    ORGANIZATIONAL GOVERNANCE TO INTEGRATE SUSTAINABILITY PROJECTS: A CASE STUDY · 2014 · DOI

  • Limited by a rather small sample due to the relatively young market of green buildings, the outcome of this paper, nevertheless, provides important direction for the continued development of meaningful metrics to assist in the establishment of a decision making support tool for project teams to facilitate optimum project delivery processes for sustainable high-performance buildings.

    Piloting Evaluation Metrics for Sustainable High-Performance Building Project Delivery · 2010 · DOI

  • Furthermore, it can be argued that the concept of the green city remains insufficiently defined, and considerable differences persist in both the method- ology and content of the indices developed to measure it.

    Urban sustainability through multiple pathways: insights from the European Green Leaf Award winning cities · 2026 · DOI

  • Future studies are recommended to investigate Green Construction implementation in other regions and to examine critical success factors that complement barrier analysis, thereby providing broader recommendations for promoting sustainable construction practices.

    Strategies for Overcoming Barriers to Green Construction Implementation Using Interpretive Structural Modeling in Building Construction Projects in Bali · 2026 · DOI

  • Fourth, research is strongly skewed toward sin‑ gle‑family housing, with comparatively limited evidence on multi‑family housing and commercial real estate, where ownership structures, tenancy, financing and risk sharing differ substantially.

    Existing evidence on the impact of climate risk on real estate valuations: a systematic map · 2026 · DOI

  • It addresses the underexplored relationship between sustainability metrics and graphical representation, with implications for how designers, stakeholders, and the public engage with environmental reasoning in built environments.

    Visualizing Sustainability in Architectural Design: A Taxonomy of Environmental Performance Representation Strategies · 2026 · DOI

  • Nevertheless, further research of a similar nature is required to corroborate the findings and to accurately quantify the contribution of demountable and modular construction to the overall sustainability performance of buildings.

    Quantification of the contribution of low-weight demountable and modular construction to the sustainable level of buildings · 2026 · DOI

  • Leading to exploring the fundamental driving reason and mechanism of BIM for green buildings is still lacking.

    EXPLORING THE DRIVING MECHANISM AND PATH OF BIM FOR GREEN BUILDINGS · 2024 · DOI

  • Their synergies make their combination likely to bring benefits for the construction industry; however, this blend of concepts has not been extensively studied in the built environment, making it interesting to investigate it.

    Interactions between Lean Construction Principles and Circular Economy Practices for the Construction Industry · 2021 · DOI

  • The methodology for this research involved using the literature and knowledge elicitation of stakeholders in the housing sector to build the initial systems thinking model (iSTM), especially where the relationships could not be established empirically.

    Zero Carbon Emissions in Buildings: A Systems Thinking Modeling Approach · 2019 · DOI

  • As a consequence, the research documents many of the pitfalls, traps, and solutions that are experienced during the construction of green buildings, but have limited knowledge of the reasons why some proposed green buildings never get developed.

    Institutional motivations and barriers to the construction of green buildings on campus · 2007 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Sustainable Building Design and Assessment

Most recent work

Find a gap in your own Sustainable Building Design and Assessment sub-topic

This page shows what the Sustainable Building Design and Assessment literature already flags as unresolved. To narrow it to your specific question, run the guided finder — it searches the gap library on demand and checks candidates against 250M+ OpenAlex works.

Open the Research Gap Finder →

Related topics in Engineering

Traffic and Road Safety
143 open questions
Spatial Cognition and Navigation
95 open questions
Smart Cities and Technologies
89 open questions
BIM and Construction Integration
87 open questions
Design Education and Practice
86 open questions
Engineering Education and Curriculum Development
82 open questions
Digital Transformation in Industry
81 open questions
Perovskite Materials and Applications
78 open questions
43 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 849 Sustainable Building Design and Assessment papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

Tools for your next paper

Gaps & Literature SearchFind open questions in any field — 120,000+ open gaps mined from our own library.Pre-CheckIs your paper ready? A Tier 1–5 acceptance probability in seconds.Journal FinderA ranked shortlist of target journals from a 17,500-venue index.Duplicate Publication CheckerCheck prior-publication & salami-slicing risk across 8 sources.Citation GeneratorFreeA DOI or title → APA, MLA, Vancouver, Chicago, BibTeX, RIS. No signup.Graphical Abstract MakerFreeTurn your findings into a colorblind-safe graphical abstract.

Compare the category — Honest roundups of the AI research tools, ours listed alongside the alternatives.

Command palette

Jump anywhere, run any action.