Sustainable building material selection: An integrated multi-criteria large group decision making framework

In the past decades, the rapid urbanisation has driven the prosperity of building industry, which, however, has led to the consumption of enormous amounts of energy and resources and the continued deterioration of the environment owing to its unsustainable development. These outcomes impact seriously the ecosystems and human health. In order to promote the sustainable performance of building sector, the widely adoption of sustainable building materials has been considered as one of the most promising ways toward this endeavor. This paper aims at addressing the problem of sustainable building material selection (SBMS) under uncertain context by developing an integrated multi-criteria large-group decision-making framework. In the proposed framework, the assessment information is characterised in the form of Improved Basic Uncertain Linguistic Information (IBULI), which incorporates reliable degrees of decision experts that can accurately quantify subjective assessment information provided under uncertainty. The weights of assessment criteria for SBMS are determined by the Quality Function Deployment-based method that is capable of accommodating the influences of multiple stakeholders and the fields of conflicts amongst them. Subsequently, the assessment information given by a large-group of decision experts are aggregated by IBULI-aggregation operators guided by an IBULI-based correlation- and consensus-driven clustering method, which achieves the classification of large-scale decision experts and the satisfied consensus level simultaneously. The selection of sustainable building materials is eventually accomplished by the IBULI-based Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution method. Finally, an illustrative example accompanied by sensitivity and comparative analyses is performed to verify the rationality and feasibility of the proposed model.