Fuzzy Decision Approach for Selection of Sustainable and Green Materials for Green Buildings [ READ ]
Sunita Bansal, Srijit Biswas, S.K. Singh
An Integrated Design approach has to be adopted while making decisions for different aspects of Sustainable and Green Buildings. Among these decisions, is selection of sustainable and green building materials because many new products of different qualities, costs and environmental impacts are entering into the market at an increasing pace. This has increased the workload and responsibilities of the specifiers who will require constant flow of information about their environmental, technical and aesthetic aspects. But genuine and authenticated information about every aspect of the material is seldom available and its suitability within the project requirements is always debatable. Environmental decisions, being closely coupled with society’s built-in uncertainties and risks, are genuinely uncertain since ecological systems as well as social systems change in the future. The selection of a suitable sustainable and green material among alternative materials is a multi-criteria decision-making problem including both quantitative and qualitative Green Building criteria. The conventional approaches to material selection problem like life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) tend to be less effective since qualitative criteria are often imprecisely defined for the decision-makers. The experts in the decision process make linguistic assessments about alternative materials and can state their order of preference with sufficient degree of conviction quantified using membership function in Fuzzy Logic. The aim of the paper is to solve material selection problem using approach of fuzzy group decision-making using individual fuzzy preference relations. The proposed model allows for the individual decision-makers to possess different aims and priorities while still assuming that the overall intention is to reach a common acceptable integrated decision on material selection apt for the project module.
Sunita Bansal, Srijit Biswas, S.K. Singh
An Integrated Design approach has to be adopted while making decisions for different aspects of Sustainable and Green Buildings. Among these decisions, is selection of sustainable and green building materials because many new products of different qualities, costs and environmental impacts are entering into the market at an increasing pace. This has increased the workload and responsibilities of the specifiers who will require constant flow of information about their environmental, technical and aesthetic aspects. But genuine and authenticated information about every aspect of the material is seldom available and its suitability within the project requirements is always debatable. Environmental decisions, being closely coupled with society’s built-in uncertainties and risks, are genuinely uncertain since ecological systems as well as social systems change in the future. The selection of a suitable sustainable and green material among alternative materials is a multi-criteria decision-making problem including both quantitative and qualitative Green Building criteria. The conventional approaches to material selection problem like life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) tend to be less effective since qualitative criteria are often imprecisely defined for the decision-makers. The experts in the decision process make linguistic assessments about alternative materials and can state their order of preference with sufficient degree of conviction quantified using membership function in Fuzzy Logic. The aim of the paper is to solve material selection problem using approach of fuzzy group decision-making using individual fuzzy preference relations. The proposed model allows for the individual decision-makers to possess different aims and priorities while still assuming that the overall intention is to reach a common acceptable integrated decision on material selection apt for the project module.
