Review on building retro-commissioning: a systematic-cascade literature analysis with expert validation

Mengxue Lu, Joseph H.K. Lai, Roger T.H. Ng and Betty W.Y. Chiu

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2025, vol. 224, issue C

Abstract: To optimize the energy performance of buildings, governments worldwide have introduced retro-commissioning (RCx), a systematic investigation of opportunities to improve the performance of existing buildings. However, RCx studies and applications are not as prevalent as those in the other building energy related domains. The past and recent states of RCx research have not been thoroughly investigated, and future research directions remain unclear. Therefore, a review is conducted to address these gaps using a systematic-cascade approach that includes: retrieval of RCx publications from the ScienceDirect and Scopus databases; bibliometric analysis of the publications using the VOSviewer software; in-depth qualitative analysis of key RCx publications and real case studies; and expert validation of the analysed findings. Key results include the identification of the regions of the past RCx studies, types of buildings and building systems investigated, data types, and data collection and analysis methods used in the studies. Distinct from the continual growth of research in the building energy domain, there was no discernible trend of RCx research. Among the past studies utilizing empirical data, universities and schools are mainly selected for testing RCx scenarios or hypotheses. Barriers and enablers for RCx implementation were found to fall into six categories: knowledge, manpower, finance, motivation, time, and data/information. Nine research gaps and corresponding future research directions were also identified. In addition to contributing to the existing body of RCx knowledge, the results of this study serve as a reference for RCx stakeholders and offer guidance for researchers to pursue further RCx studies.

Keywords: Building energy; Commissioning; retro-Commissioning; Retrofit; Review (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032125007890
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:224:y:2025:i:c:s1364032125007890

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2025.116116

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().