A Grey-based Multi-criteria Decision Making for Material Selection in Sustainable Buildings

Material selection in sustainable buildings is a multi-criteria decision making, as the sustainable development concept considers economic, environmental and social dimensions. Residential buildings which consume vast amounts of areas of our cities are known as main contributors to the environmental impacts especially CO2 emissions, places to live, and also job creators in the related industries. For these reasons, consideration of all sustainability aspects is of high importance. However, many research efforts have just included cost and environmental impacts in their methods to select materials. This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision making tool, which solves the materials selection problem and provides a sustainable solution considering three criteria: CO2 emissions, cost, and social acceptance as representatives of environmental, economic, and social aspects, respectively. To incorporate the uncertainty inherent in many decision making problems and as a consequence of inevitable deficiencies in evaluations and measurements, the proposed method, which is called Grey-OWA, employs grey theory and then uses ordered weighting average (OWA) operator to select the optimal decision. Finally, an example, which is a part of a real case study, is used to assess the workability and capabilities of the proposed method.

Keywords:

Material selection , Sustainable buildings , MCDM , Grey theory , OWA operator