Integrating and ranking sustainability criteria for housing

Abstract

Numerous researchers have determined sustainability criteria relating to environmental performance but the other two sustainability components -economic and social performance -have not been taken into consideration in an integrated and hierarchy manner. Existing sustainability assessment methods (e.g., LEED, GBI, IGBC, and BREEAM) ignore the economic and social aspects, and sustainable criteria are not prioritized for decision making facilitation. To prioritize sustainable criteria for residential buildings in the triquetrous sustainability model including environmental, economic, and social in a global and integrated manner, a Fuzzy-AHP tool was employed and a structured expert-based development process comprised of seventeen building practitioners and eight academics from sixteen nations was conducted globally among carefully selected experts. A Fuzzy Weighted Hierarchy for Triquetrous Sustainability (FWH-TS) in residential buildings was developed at the end of this study. Assisted by programmers, the FWH-TS is expected to be developed into a PC software or Apps in the near future to improve construction management.

Ranking of Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the New Housing Development Projects: Case of the Baltic States

“…AHP method was proven as efficient, and is widely used by many authors for different sustainability-related tasks' solutions (see e.g., [24,32,36,37,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. Moreover, approximately 3000 papers concerning multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in the environmental field were identified by Cegan et al [57].…”

“…The construction industry has a long history in developing and using of indicators, alongside of many general efforts to develop sustainable development indicators [23]. However, social and economic indicators are often neglected in the literature [2,9,24] and, as Berardi [25] notes, the social aspect is the most ignored dimension of sustainability.…”

“…There are many methods developed for sustainability assessment (e.g., LEED in the USA, BREEAM in the UK, CASBEE (Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency) in Japan, and GBTool (Green Building Tool) in Canada) and Life-cycle-based tools (e.g., Eco-Quantum in Netherlands, EcoEffect in Sweden, ENVEST (Environmental impact analysis for buildings) in the UK, BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability) in the USA, ATHENA (Athena Sustainable Materials Institute Life Cycle Assessment Tools) in Canada, and LCA (Lifecycle Assessment) House in Finland); however, "usually these methods ignore the economic and social aspects, and sustainable criteria are not prioritized for decision making facilitation" [24].…”

“…Abdul-Rahman et al [24] developed a Fuzzy Weighted Hierarchy for Triquetrous Sustainability (FWH-TS) for integrating and ranking sustainability criteria for housing, in total 52 environmental, economic and social indicators were used.…”

“…Landscape design [29,32,36,62,64]. Ecosystem preservation [9,19,24,26,29,33,[60][61][62]64]. Quality of outdoor environment [14,19,30,31,35,36,39,64,65].…”