Sustainability-Oriented Approach to Assist Decision Makers in Building Facade Management

Abstract

The building sector has a major economic, environmental and social impact on society; hence, it is crucial to promote sustainable construction practice. The facade is one of the largest main components of a building, which could strongly contribute to the sustainability performance for the whole building. Previous studies started defining tools to assess facade sustainability, although relevant indicators were dismissed or, if considered, they were rather subjectively quantified. Likewise, most existing tools omit stakeholder satisfaction in the assessment process for optimal facade systems. In this regard, this paper presents a new systematic approach based on MIVES (The Integrated Value Model for Sustainable Assessment) for holistic sustainability assessment of building facade systems by integrating stakeholders' satisfaction in the decision-making process. To this end, for the first time to the authors' best knowledge, the most representative and discriminative indicators for quantifying facade sustainability were identified to define a new approach to minimise subjectivity in the decision-making process and, consequently, to ease the task of decision-makers when choosing and designing facade alternatives for new buildings and rehabilitation. This approach is validated and initially applied to assess the six most common residential facade systems in Barcelona. Results indicate that these building elements have low to medium sustainability performance.

Mives Multi-Criteria Framework to Sustainability Index of Design for Manufacture and Assembly

“…MIVES has been used in several studies to conduct sustainability assessments of buildings, especially façade design (Egiluz et al, 2021;Gilani et al, 2017Gilani et al, , 2019Gilani et al, , 2022Habibi et al, 2020). Several studies have adopted the MIVES technique in the AEC industry.…”

“…In addition, the "triple bottom line" (i.e., economic, environmental, social) was widely employed as the three dimensions' requirements (see Table 1). Thereafter, most studies categorised indicators into these three dimensions, although a few studies tried to involve some other dimensions, like the technological dimension (Pons-Valladares et al, 2023) and the functional dimension (Gilani et al, 2022). However, by dividing the indicators in this way, namely 3-4 dimensions to constructing sustainability, contradictions may arise.…”

“…In addition, MIVES performs well in uncertainty analysis and calibration problems. It can be employed in different locations with varying characteristics without being constrained by the present conjuncture (Gilani et al, 2019(Gilani et al, , 2022. These main characteristics make MIVES unique among other competing methods for developing the DfMA sustainability index.…”

Sustainability risk assessment in mega construction projects

“…The first step elaborates on the quantification process of the sustainable construction objectives to determine the importance of the objectives through the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). AHP has been chosen for the prioritisation process of sustainable construction objectives since it is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method that allows pairwise comparisons amongst alternatives hierarchically (Gilani et al, 2022). The second step assesses the expected influence values of the risk factors on the sustainable construction objectives by Cross-Impact Analysis (CIA).…”

“…AHP has been chosen for the prioritization process of sustainable construction objectives since it is a multicriteria decision-making method that allows pairwise comparisons among alternatives hierarchically (Gilani et al, 2022). The second step assesses the expected influence values of the risk factors on the sustainable construction objectives by Cross-Impact Analysis (CIA).…”