A new Decision Support Tool for assessing cities sustainability levels: the IBTool software

Digital Tools for urban sustainability and Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment Tools (NSATs), designed to certify and promote sustainable development initiatives at both neighbourhood and building scales, are gaining increasing relevance in supporting and facilitating city monitoring and transformation processes. These tools can generate enabling impacts on streetlevel bureaucracy and enhance the capacity of Public Administrations (PAs) to pursue local sustainability goals aligned with the directives of the 2030 Agenda. However, data fragmentation, limited availability, and difficulties in calculating urban-scale indicators often hinder their definition and monitoring. In such a context, it becomes essential to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are consistent with territorial specificities and effectively measure sustainability performance. In response to this need, the Research Project of National Relevance (PRIN) GLOSSA has developed an open-source software called IBTool, which functions as a Decision Support System (DSS) based on the Goal 11 indicators of the SDGs. IBTool is designed to assist PAs in collaborative processes of KPI validation, selection, and weighting, integrating clustering algorithms and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to evaluate the sustainability performance of neighbourhoods and buildings, as well as the impacts of projects at different scales. The aim of this contribution is to show the architecture and development phases of IBTool, designed to combine scientific robustness, operational flexibility, and multi-level approaches in line with the 2030 Agenda.