Sustainability Design Smart Advisor

Functional Requirements

• Enhance productivity while improving the quality and speed of sustainability advisory services
• Deliver highly accurate results, with a minimum confidence level of 95%
• Support both conversational chat and form-based wizards for user input
• Provide instant Q&A on sustainability standards and regulations
• Automate ETTV/RETV/CUI checks and generate auto-filled scorecards
• Perform ETTV design reviews and suggest improvements to meet higher performance standards
• Simulate “what-if” scenarios (e.g., glazing specifications, shading depth, and façade orientation trade-offs)
• Parse ETTV worksheets and supporting calculations; validate formulas and inputs, such as WWR, U-values, SHGC, and orientations
• Produce “delta-to-target” summaries for Green Mark points with recommended upgrades to reach higher ratings
• Identify gaps with precise citations and provide prioritised fixes and parameter tweaks to support compliance
• Provide project-specific recommendations and advisory strategies through a secure web application
• Optionally extend to Design for Maintainability compliance and other environmental sustainability (ES) checks, if viable
  

Technical Requirements

Core Requirements:

• Ingest data from multiple formats (.pdf, .docx, .xlsx, .ifc, .dwg/.dxf, .csv, .json, scanned images) using connectors and OCR/CAD parsers
• Normalise inputs into a unified project graph of spaces, systems, assets, and parameters
• Build a domain-aware knowledge graph and index documents with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), retraining periodically on new BSD project data
• Deploy large language models and surrogate models to support prompt-driven Q&A and rapid “what-if” energy-model approximations
• Enable hybrid co-pilot UX by supporting both conversational chat and structured form wizards with shared live context
• Link every finding to its rule clause, source location, and suggested remedy for transparency and explainability
• Implement rule packages by domain (e.g., ETTV, Green Mark NRB 202x, SLE targets), with version control and effective dates
• Detect regulatory changes by monitoring sources: BCA circulars, Green Mark updates, and Singapore Standards
• Support human-in-the-loop review boards where changes are triaged, mapped into machine-readable rules, and validated against a golden set of projects
• Enable safe rollouts of new rules through canary releases to selected users, followed by platform-wide adoption. 
• Allow users to pin projects to specific rule versions for auditability
• Meet service-level agreements (SLA) by applying critical regulatory updates within 2 to 4 weeks of publication
• Secure the system with enterprise-grade authentication, encrypted storage, and audit logging of actions
• Implement a DevOps/MLOps pipeline with source control, manual builds, periodic retraining, and basic monitoring
• Ensure high performance and scalability, with high availability, near real-time retrievals, and fast draft generation

Additional Preferences:

• Incorporate a human-in-the-loop QA process to review low-confidence parses
• Capture user feedback through in-app ratings and use it to trigger automatic model updates

‍Expected Outcomes

• Improvement in productivity and consistency in sustainability advisory by reducing manual effort and accelerating compliance checks
• High accuracy in compliance with Green Mark and related sustainability regulations
• More sustainable building designs as project teams are provided with actionable insights and upgrade recommendations
• Delta-to-target summaries that show how far a design is from Green Mark points, with suggested improvements to achieve higher ratings
• Greater industry adoption of Super Low Energy (SLE) and low-carbon strategies at manageable incremental costs

Deployment Environment and Constraints

The Smart Advisor should be able to handle a variety of project types including residential, commercial, institutional, industrial, and data centres. It must be robust enough to process approximately one million documents across multiple formats and be accessible via a secure, user-friendly web application.

BSD will support pilot testing with a phased scope focusing first on ETTV compliance, Green Mark envelope checks, and energy audit analytics. Outputs will include gap analyses, suggested remedies, and later extension to draft submission artefacts (compliance checklists, annotated markups, ETTV and improvement memos).

BSD will provide:

• Access to its repository of project files and documentation (approx. one million documents) for model training and validation
• Domain expertise from consultants to review and validate outputs
• Collaboration with industry partners, such as City Developments Ltd, for pilot testing on new residential projects
• Feedback loops to refine accuracy and validate use cases

‍Commercialisation and Scaling

BSD intends to first deploy the solution internally to strengthen its consultancy competitiveness, then offer it as a commercial tool to industry stakeholders, including architects, engineers, consultants, developers, and contractors. 

The Smart Advisor could become a catalyst for industry-wide adoption, supporting professionals in achieving compliance efficiently while advancing Singapore’s 80-80-80 sustainability goals.