Exploring an Effectively Established Green Building Evaluation System Through the Grey Clustering Model

The current green building assessment system suffers from issues such as insufficient coverage of smart indicators, significant biases in subjective weighting, and weak dynamic adaptability, which restrict the scientific promotion of green buildings. This study focuses on the gaps in the quantitative assessment of smart technologies in China’s green building evaluation standards (such as the current Green Building Evaluation Standard). While domestic standards are relatively well-established in traditional dimensions like energy conservation and environmental protection, there are fragmentation issues in the assessment of smart technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and BIM. Moreover, the coverage of smart indicators in non-civilian building fields is significantly lower than that of international systems such as LEED and BREEAM. This study determined the basic framework of the evaluation indicator system through the Delphi method. Drawing on international experience and contextualized within China’s (GB/T 50378-2019) standards, it systematically integrated secondary indicators including “smart security,” “smart energy,” “smart design,” and “smart services,” and constructed dual-drive evaluation dimensions of “greenization + smartization.” This elevated the proportion of the smartization dimension to 35%, filling the gap in domestic standards regarding the quantitative assessment of smart technologies. In terms of research methods, combined weighting using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and entropy weight method was adopted to balance subjective and objective weights and reduce biases (the resource conservation dimension accounted for 39.14% of the combined weights, the highest proportion). By integrating the grey clustering model with the whitening weight function to handle fuzzy information, evaluations were categorized into four grey levels (D/C/B/A), enhancing the dynamic adaptability of the system. Case verification showed that Project A achieved a comprehensive evaluation score of 5.223, with a grade of B. Among its indicators, smart-related ones such as “smart energy” (37.17%) and “smart design” (37.93%) scored significantly higher than traditional indicators, verifying that the system successfully captured the project’s high performance in smart indicators. The research results indicate that the efficient utilization of resources is the core goal of green buildings. Especially under pressures of energy shortages and carbon emissions, energy conservation and resource recycling have become key priorities. The evaluation system constructed in this study can provide theoretical guidance and technical support for the promotion, industrial upgrading, and sustainable development of green buildings (including non-civilian buildings) under the dual-carbon goals. Its characteristic of “dynamic monitoring + smart integration” forms differentiated complementarity with international standards, making it more aligned with the needs of China’s intelligent transformation of buildings.