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Sustainable Decision Making in Civil and Construction Engineering

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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Engineering and Science".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (26 March 2023) | Viewed by 18832

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Jolanta Tamošaitienė

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Guest Editor

Faculty of Civil Engineering, Institute of Sustainable Construction, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Saulėtekio al. 11, LT-10231 Vilnius, Lithuania
Interests: civil engineering; construction; decision making; modelling; multi criteria decision making (MCDM); risk; sustainability
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In contemporary civil construction engineering, sustainable and rational solutions to problems are of utmost importance. In turn, sustainable solutions demand decision-making models, while decision-making models assume that decision-makers make choices that maximise benefits and minimise losses, considering sustainability aspects. Sustainability-centred decision-making in civil and construction engineering assumes the use of resources, rationally organised processes, the cost of minimisation, the optimised project duration, the best quality of the product, etc. New and emerging risks can be detected for the identification of an individual situation, problem formulation and analysis, modelling, development of problem-solving processes, methodology design, analysis of the condition, calculation, checking and comparison of results and making the final decision.

Problem evaluation attributes are selected considering the interests and goals of an object or process, as well as factors that influence decision-process efficiency and value creation with sustainability aspects. Traditionally, decision making needs to consider several different criteria; therefore, multicriteria decision making (MCDM) approaches with hybrid, extended or modified decision-making methods are used while considering sustainability aspects for this purpose.

This Special Issue welcomes articles that offer technical and environmental, economic and social benefits from civil and construction engineering solutions involving various decision-making methods, methodologies, models, algorithms and tools and decision support systems including sustainability aspects. Complex, interdisciplinary approaches are welcome. Papers that discuss solutions of specific problems in a wider context are also welcome.

Dr. Jolanta Tamošaitienė
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

civil
construction
engineering
multicriteria decision making
processes
modelling
sustainability
assessment

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 1538 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Manpower Allocation of Work Activities for Producing Precast Components: Empirical Study in Taiwan

by Jieh-Haur Chen, Chih-Lin Chen and Hsi-Hsien Wei

Sustainability 2023, 15(9), 7436; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15097436 - 30 Apr 2023

Viewed by 2772

Abstract

The production of precast components in the construction industry is a labor-intensive process. The objectives of this study are to prove the feasibility of using rough set theory to classify and weigh impact attributes, and to develop a model to assess the total quantities of labor needed for precast structural elements using a rough set enhanced K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN). Three main building components (beams, girders, and columns) were collected from the production of precast elements in Taiwan. After trimming and analyzing the basic data, the rough set approach is used to classify and weight the attributes into three levels of impact based on their frequency. A rough set enhanced KNN is accordingly developed, yielding an accuracy rate of 92.36%, which is 8.09% higher than the result obtained when using the KNN algorithm. A practical and effective prediction model would assist managers to estimate the manpower requirement of precast projects. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Decision Making in Civil and Construction Engineering)

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26 pages, 1799 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Barriers to Attracting Private Sector Investment in Public Road Infrastructure Projects in the Developing Country of Iran

by Daniel W. M. Chan, Hadi Sarvari, Ahmad Abdul Jaleel Abdul Husein, Khalid Mubarak Awadh, Mahboobeh Golestanizadeh and Matteo Cristofaro

Sustainability 2023, 15(2), 1452; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15021452 - 12 Jan 2023

Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3532

Abstract

Private sector investment, the mainstream financing method for procuring public road transport development projects, has encountered several profound difficulties and risks during execution, particularly in developing countries. However, there needs to be more extensive investigations on the major barriers facing road transport infrastructure projects in these countries. In this vein, the present study aims to identify and assess the perceived barriers inhibiting private sector investment in delivering public road transport infrastructure projects in the developing country of Iran. The research method adopted is based on a descriptive survey with a three-round Delphi technique with 35 experts from both the private and public sector in Iran. According to the research study results, four main groups of legal and organizational, political, economic, and operational barriers have been found to significantly impact the attraction of private sector investment in such projects. The three most significant obstacles for public road transport infrastructure projects in developing countries include: (i) a lack of financial and investment safety; (ii) a lack of proficient managers and policies of public organizations in order to facilitate the process of privatization; and (iii) corruption in the privatization process. The survey findings can help the government and policymakers to eliminate or alleviate the potential barriers towards private sector participation in future public road infrastructure projects, particularly in those developing countries such as Iran. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Decision Making in Civil and Construction Engineering)

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29 pages, 809 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Novel Linguistic Interval-Valued Pythagorean Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Group Decision-Making for Sustainable Building Materials Selection

by Yang Zhou and Guangmin Yang

Sustainability 2023, 15(1), 106; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010106 - 21 Dec 2022

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1539

Abstract

The linguistic interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy (LIVPF) sets, which absorb the advantages of linguistic terms set and interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy sets, can efficiently describe decision makers’ evaluation information in multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problems. When investigating aggregation operators of linguistic interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy (LIVPF) information, we have to consider two important issues, viz. the operational rules of LIVPF numbers and aggregation functions. The classical Archimedean t-norm and t-conorm (ATT) are a famous t-norm and t-conorm, which can produce some special cases. Recently, ATT has been widely applied in different fuzzy decision-making information. Hence, in this paper, for the first issue, we propose some novel operational rules of LIVPF numbers based on ATT. The new operational laws are flexible and can generate some useful operations. For the second issue, we choose a powerful function, i.e., the extended power average (EPA) operator as the aggregation function. The prominent advantages of EPA are that it not only considers the relationship among input arguments, but also dynamically changes the weights of input arguments by employing a parameter. Hence, our proposed novel aggregation operators for LIVPFNs are flexible and is suitable to handle MAGDM problems in actual life. Afterward, we further present a novel MAGDM method under LIVPF conditions. The main finding of our study is a new MAGDM method, which is more powerful and flexible than existing ones. Finally, we apply the method in a sustainable building materials selection to show its effectiveness. Additionally, comparison analysis is provided to demonstrate the advantages and superiorities of the proposed method. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Decision Making in Civil and Construction Engineering)

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23 pages, 696 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Model for the Sustainable Material Selection by Applying Integrated Dempster-Shafer Evidence Theory and Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) Method

by Seyed Morteza Hatefi, Hamideh Asadi, Gholamreza Shams, Jolanta Tamošaitienė and Zenonas Turskis

Sustainability 2021, 13(18), 10438; https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810438 - 18 Sep 2021

Cited by 29 | Viewed by 4436

Abstract

The construction industry is a vital part of the modern economic system. Construction work often has significant negative impacts on the environment and sustainable economic development, such as degradation of the environment, depletion of resources, and waste generation. Therefore, environmental concerns must be taken into account when evaluating and making decisions in the construction industry. In this regard, sustainable construction is considered as the best way to avoid resource depletion and address environmental concerns. Selection of sustainable building materials is an important strategy in sustainable construction that plays an important role in the design and construction phase of buildings. The assessment of experts is one of the most important steps in the material selection process, and their subjective judgment can lead to unpredictable uncertainty. The existing methods cannot effectively demonstrate and address uncertainty. This paper proposes an integrated Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory of evidence and the ARAS method for selecting sustainable materials under uncertainty. The Dempster-Shafer Evidence Theory is a relatively new and appropriate tool for substantiating decisions when information is nonspecific, ambiguous, or conflicting. The Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) method has many advantages to deal with MCDM problems with non-commensurable and even conflicting criteria and to obtain the priority of alternatives based on the utility function. The proposed method converts experts’ opinions into the basic probability assignments for real alternatives, which are suitable for DS evidence theory. It uses the ARAS method to obtain final estimation results. Finally, a real case study identifying the priority of using five possible alternative building materials demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed approach in addressing the challenges of sustainable construction. Four main criteria including economic, social, environmental, and technical criteria and 25 sub-criteria were considered for the selection of sustainable materials. The specific case study using the proposed method reveals that the weight of economic, socio-cultural, environmental, and technical criteria are equal to 0.327, 0.209, 0.241, and 0.221, respectively. Based on these results, economic and environmental criteria are determined as the most important criteria. The results of applying the proposed method reveal that aluminum siding with a final score of 0.538, clay brick with a score of 0.494, and stone façade with a final score of 0.482 are determined as the best alternatives in terms of sustainability. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Decision Making in Civil and Construction Engineering)

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18 pages, 5461 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Decision-Making Rules and the Influence of Memory Data

by Vaclav Beran, Marek Teichmann and Frantisek Kuda

Sustainability 2021, 13(3), 1396; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13031396 - 29 Jan 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2088

Abstract

The problems that decision-makers face can escalate under imbalances, turbulent development, risks, uncertainties, disasters, and other influences. The development of processes in technical and economic structures is generally considered complex and chaotic, and it usually expands into innumerable dynamic influences. The paper focuses on the evaluation of the decision criteria choice structure, such as the factual cause of the consequences (e.g., future threats, opportunities, chances, occasion). It offers a graphical vision of the future forecast. It draws attention to prevention and prophylaxis versus criterion-generated time–space (TS). The paper deals with the question: Is it possible to choose and recommend the right time and place of process activities? The paper formulates a positive answer and illustrates a range of consequences. Developed activities (investment, production, etc.) take place in a defined TS; over time, they create new time-series states and expand the space by defining processes as a time series of activities. In a broader context, the article deals with the issue of the lifecycle of decision rules (dynamic proposal of opportunities) as the first step of decision making, i.e., the decision about the existence of opportunity. On the one hand, it respects static applications based on equilibrium states, while on the other hand, it draws attention to the need for a dynamic view of turbulent, dynamic, chaotic, and nonlinear phenomena. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Decision Making in Civil and Construction Engineering)

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13 pages, 2694 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Project Portfolio Construction Using Extreme Value Theory

by Jolanta Tamošaitienė, Vahidreza Yousefi and Hamed Tabasi

Sustainability 2021, 13(2), 855; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020855 - 16 Jan 2021

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2881

Abstract

Choosing proper projects has a great impact on organizational success. Firms have various factors for choosing projects based on their different objectives and strategies. The problem of optimization of projects’ risks and returns is among the most prevalent issues in project portfolio selection. In order to optimize and select proper projects, the amount of projects’ expected risks and returns must be evaluated correctly. Determining the relevant distribution is very important in achieving these expectations. In this research, various types of practical distributions were examined, and considering expected and realized risks, the effects of choosing the different distribution on estimation of risks on construction projects were studied. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Decision Making in Civil and Construction Engineering)

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