A Combined Simulation-Decision Making Approach under Uncertainty to eva‎luate the Sustainability of Road Construction Projects with Emphasis on the Social Aspect

1/1/1900 12:00:00 AM

Construction is indeed among the most essential and challenging industries worldwide. Accounting for a large portion of resource consumption in countries, construction contributes to the gross domestic product (GDP). Road construction is a crucial part of the construction industry and has a close correlation with daily life. Hence, road construction can be considered to have a significant effect on sustainable development both in cities and countries. There are numerous intrinsic complexities and uncertainties in sustainable road construction. As a result, problem eva‎luation and decision-making are challenging for the design managers of road construction projects. Also, due to various sustainability eva‎luation indicators and their interactions, it would be complicated and even impossible to make decisions in such projects and select the most sustainable solution in crucial conditions without simulating the feedback of these indicators. The present study proposes a comprehensive approach based on sustainable construction principles to eva‎luate, prioritize, and select the most sustainable solutions in constructing roads. The first part of the proposed approach identifies and lists sustainable road construction eva‎luation indicators using the literature. Then, experts’ opinions and a novel group weighting and ranking technique in the intuitionistic fuzzy environment are employed to extract the key sustainability indicators from the indicator list. In the second part, the extracted key indicators are exploited to prioritize the alternatives. The experts’ opinions are collected on the importance of the key indicators, their associations, and the importance of each alternative based on the key indicators in the intuitionistic fuzzy environment. In the next step, bootstrapping is used to simulate and integrate the experts’ opinions in an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy environment. A fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is utilized to simulate the interactions of the key indicators, and the results are applied to the importance of the key indicators. Finally, an extended group decision-making technique is employed to prioritize alternatives and help managers identify the most sustainable alternatives. Also, to validate the proposed approach, a case study was conducted to prioritize road construction projects based on sustainable development indicators, comparing the results of the proposed approach to conventional decision-making models and performing the sensitivity analysis of different parameters. The first part of the proposed approach ranks thirty initial indicators, the top nine selected as the key sustainability indicators. Then, the second part prioritizes potential projects based on the key sustainability indicators. The results of the proposed approach indicated that eva‎luation and decision-making were performed by managers more accurately and rapidly. Since novel fuzzy mathematical models were employed, the solutions of the proposed approach would be much more reliable than those of conventional methods. Moreover, the results suggest that incorporating the indicators of all three sustainable development dimensions (i.e., social, environmental, and economic) and their interactions were effective in the final priorities. This helps managers make proper decisions under uncertainties.

پروژه¬هاي راه¬سازي , ساخت پايدار , تصميم¬گيري گروهي چند معياره , روش نگاشت شناختي فازي (FCM) , عدم¬قطعيت , فازي ترديدي , شبيه¬سازي بوتسترپ (Bootstrap)

Road construction projects , Sustainable construction , Multi-criteria group decision making , Fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) , Uncertainty , intuitionistic fuzzy , Bootstrap simulation

Hassan Hashemi

Parviz Ghoddousi - Farnad Nasirzadeh