Towards sustainability‐oriented decision making: Model development and its validation via a comparative case study on building construction methods

Abstract

In order to facilitate the shift towards sustainability in the building industry, development of building‐specific sustainability assessment tools that evaluate and integrate related environmental and socioeconomic impacts is needed. Existing assessment tools mainly focus on environmental and economic issues and give limited consideration on social sustainability. This study fills this gap through proposing an integrated building‐specific sustainability assessment model. This model was developed based on a conceptual model of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), which is theoretically a combination of environmental life cycle assessment, life cycle cost analysis, and social life cycle assessment. An integrated AHP‐ELECTRE approach was adopted to provide a logical backbone for the model. This LCSA model is demonstrated through a case study to choose the best alternative regarding sustainability from three structural designs, that is, modular construction‐based, semiprefabricated, and conventional designs. Results show that semiprefabricated design is the best option in the context of this study.

Application of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment in the Construction Sector: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Six studies performed a cradle-to-use assessment (Figure 12). It is important to note that not all studies used these exact wordings for system boundaries, but instead named individual process steps, such as for example: raw material extraction to use, or raw material extraction, manufacturing, construction and operational phases [88,[92][93][94], which makes them inconsistent with ISO 14040 (2006), the main international framework. For reasons of comparison, we recoded the individually named process steps to well-known system boundary definitions, following ISO 14040 (2006; Figure 12).…”

“…To return to the beginning of the article and the rating systems or schemes used (LEED; BREEAM or in Germany DGNB), only four (21%) of the 19 case studies mentioned rating schemes or made a reference to them. No further details were mentioned; they (4x LEED, 1x BREEAM) served as an introduction or future outlook topic only [85,89,93,94].…”

“…The results themselves were reported as absolute numbers, percentages or graphs. Relevant and in need of improvement are the details and information on FU, databases, exact procedures, justified indicator selection, etc., which were partly missing [4,5,[91][92][93]98,[101][102][103]. In particular, a very deliberate and well-founded selection of the functional unit is relevant in the construction sector.…”

“…Social conditions are dynamic, so social data change more rapidly compared to environmental data [113]. The complex stakeholder situation in construction processes complicates the assessment of social sustainability, and relevant stakeholders are not all adequately covered in S-LCA studies [93,114].…”

Assessing the important factors of sustainable agriculture development: An Indicateurs de Durabilité des Exploitations Agricoles‐Analytic Hierarchy Process study in the northern region of Vietnam

“…While the first two methods focus on grouping individual indicators into important ones, the last focuses on determining the important criteria of factors that can affect the decision‐making process (Emrouznejad & Marra, 2017). While AHP has been widely used in many sectors such as health care, construction, aviation, and retailer (Erol, Cakar, Erel, & Sari, 2009; Hussain, Khan, & Ajmal, 2019; Liu & Qian, 2019; Loh et al, 2020), applications of AHP to assess sustainability performance in the agriculture sector have just recently became more popular. For example, Rezaei‐Moghaddam and Karami (2008) used AHP to examine the important factors within the economic, social and ecological criteria that can affect the agriculture development in Iran.…”