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Malaysia, like most other developing countries, is facing an increase in the generation of waste and accompanying problems with the disposal of this waste. A large number of biomass wastes were generated due to increased activity in the agricultural and agro-industrial sectors, which led to producing environmental hazards and waste management issues. On the other situation, the energy consumption to cool the indoor building environment is high due to the building being exposed directly to solar radiation throughout the daytime, which increases the temperature outside and inside the building. Most of the low-medium cost housing schemes were constructed using metal roof covering without providing a roof insulation layer which causes a rising in indoor temperature and creates uncomfortable surroundings. Moreover, existing materials for roof insulation in the market use inorganic synthetic materials that could harm human health. The study aims to investigate the potential use of agricultural wastes for the production of roof board insulation material that can provide economic value added to agricultural waste, reduce the environmental issue and provide eco-friendly, sustainable building material. In this study, these agricultural wastes are combined in different proportions of 50% individual fibres, such as sugarcane bagasse with coconut husk, empty fruit bunch with mesocarp fibre, coconut husk with empty fruit bunch, and sugarcane bagasse with mesocarp fibre. The sample was fabricated using the hot-press machine and went through various physical and mechanical testing, which involved thickness of swelling, modulus of rupture, and thermal conductivity. The finding showed that the mixed fibre of empty fruit bunch and mesocarp fibre achieved all the criteria such as density (427 <500kg/m3); thickness of swelling (19< 20%); modulus of rupture (514<800psi), thermal conductivity (0.0856<0.25 W/m.K) met with the standard requirement in every laboratory test conducted. The outcome of this study suggests that empty fruit bunch and mesocarp fibre are the potential materials for the production of roof board thermal insulation. However, modification of physical and mechanical properties of waste fibre is required to achieve superior performance and is ready to be provided in the market. This study is aligned with the government initiative for the growth of green building materials for sustainable development in the construction industry.

Green building practices play an important role in achieving sustainability, especially in the construction industry. Green buildings are built to minimise the impact on the environment while reducing the impact of the building on the occupants. Unfortunately, the focus is on building green rather than in its maintenance. Correspondingly, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a tool that has been promoted for its simplicity and the advantages of maintaining a delivery system. It assures the maintenance effectiveness of each industry, such as improving project quality, reducing waste, reducing production costs, increasing hardware accessibility and enhancing organisational support conditions. Meanwhile, procurement is considered to be the key to strengthen the maintenance operation of the construction industry. This study adopts the TPM concept for the maintenance of green buildings in Malaysia and aims to present the TPM concept for the maintenance of green buildings, and to establish the best procurement to adopt TPM for the maintenance of green buildings in Malaysia. This study has employed a qualitative approach where face-to-face and telephone interviews have been adopted. Interviews have been conducted with seven prominent respondents who possess more than 5 years of experience in green building maintenance. Content and thematic analyses have been used to analyse the data that are collected from the interviews; findings show that most of the respondents agreed that TPM could be adopted in the maintenance of green buildings. It has also been identified that for a public project the most appropriate procurement method is the facilities management contract whereas for private project the most popular procurements for green building maintenance are the lump sum contract, out-tasking contract and term contract. The results of this study provide practitioners with a new insight into the impromptu creation of a total productive maintenance concept that could improve the current building maintenance sector.

Facility Layout Problem (FLP) is gaining increasing attention among researchers; it is a term relating to the poor layout of facilities as a significant contributing factor of poor performance. FLP is of paramount importance when determining inefficiencies in large room layouts, such as a library building, since the building’s layout closely influences air distribution and impacts on human comfort. Thus, this can lead to unnecessary high energy use to mitigate any inefficiencies. This problem is classified as an NP-hard problem (non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness), considering the various factors influencing thermal factors and layout design. However, previous research shows a lack of consideration of FLP for large rooms. It is identified that various types of constraints are considered in the layout problem literature, and penalty-based constraints are often being prioritised by mere human judgement and intuition. Hence, the accuracy of the objective decision-making is questionable. Therefore, this study proposes a multi-stage methodology to determine the weight of each constraint for FLP by using a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method specific to a library building as a case study exemplar. This study’s main focus is to determine penalty based constraints in meta-heuristic approaches for the effective use of FLP. This study concludes by advocating that the proposed methodological approach can be used to identify the most significant constraints in FLP.