Study of Alternatives for the Design of Sustainable Low-Income Housing in Brazil

Abstract

Despite insufficient housing facilities, particularly in developing countries, construction systems are generally selected intuitively or based on conventional solutions sanctioned by practice. The present study aims to evaluate different options for the design of low-income housing in Brazil by integrating the life cycle assessment (LCA) into the decision-making process. To achieve this objective, three single-family projects with different construction systems were selected and analyzed. The most sustainable design was selected through the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The considered parameters, which were obtained through a survey with professionals and customers, included cost, environmental impact, thermal comfort, construction time, and cultural acceptance. LCA and life cycle cost assessment (LCCA) were performed with the frontier’s system considering the cradle-to-gate cycle, which included the extraction of raw materials, manufacture of building materials, and housing construction. The projects were modelled using Autodesk Revit software with the Tally application for LCA evaluation. The results indicated that light steel frame houses present a better behavior than other conventional alternatives, and the integration of building information modelling with LCA and LCCA in the design phase can lead to the development of more sustainable houses.

A Review on Life Cycle Cost Analysis of Buildings Based on Building Information Modeling

“…The choice of scheme is especially important for green buildings (Marzouk et al, 2016(Marzouk et al, , 2018AbouHamad & Abu-Hamd, 2019), low-income buildings (Marzouk et al, 2016;Bianchi et al, 2021), and open buildings (Juan & Hsing, 2017) in value engineering.…”

“…After these economic, environmental, and social impacts are obtained for each part, these data are assembled. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) (Bianchi et al, 2021;Jalilzadehazhari et al, 2019), Genetic Algorithm (Zhuang et al, 2021), NSGA-II genetic algorithm (Marzouk et al, 2016), Entropy-TOPSIS (Jalaei et al, 2015) can be used to balance these impacts. In addition, if environmental and social impacts can be monetized, these economic, environmental, and social costs can be summarized to get life cycle sustainability cost (LCSC).…”

“…More and more researchers have tried to combine environmental and social impacts with LCC to achieve LCSA, and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be used to aggregate economic, social, and environmental impacts into a score for decision-making (Bianchi et al, 2021;Jalilzadehazhari et al, 2019). However, the scores of environmental and social indicators are often subjective and cannot be directly compared with economic costs.…”

Exploring the synergies between Life Cycle cost / Whole Life Cost and Building Information Modeling: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Its main objective is to optimize the investments made to obtain expected performance. [5,[23][24][25][26]28,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]…”

Comparison of Brazilian Social Interest Housing Projects Considering Sustainability

“…An LCC comprises the following steps: (i) definition of the object of study; (ii) estimating the life cycle of the study elements; (iii) elaboration of the life cycle inventory of each of the components; and (iv) financial update and composition of total costs When several alternatives and multiple criteria need to be considered, using multicriteria decision-making methods (MCDM) is essential. They may be applied to different fields [53][54][55], allowing the decision maker to assess intricate problems involving complex problems involving multiple and conflicting criteria based on the subjective opinions of a group of experts or interested parties [56].…”