Design, Material Selection and Manufacturing for Sustainable Construction: An Analytical Network Process Approach

Abstract

Sustainable design, material selection and manufacturing of building materials serve as an important aspects of building project. Recent design decision, material selection and material manufacturing procedures fail to provide remedy to the environmental impacts caused in terms of carbon footprint and embodied energy. The research report in this paper was to address the issue in the Malaysia construction industry. This paper presented an Analytical Network Process (ANP) which is a multi-criteria decision-making technique to determine the effective strategy for material impact towards the environment with respect to design, selection and manufacturing of the building material to develop a less embodied energy profile buildings. An expert opinion survey was conducted using a well-structured questionnaire which was scaled according to saaty's with (1) equal importance to (9) extreme importance. Three (3) responses were received which satisfies Saaty's assertion on ANP. The retrieved questionnaire was then filled into the multi criteria decision making tools and findings showed that the most important priorities base on expert opinion were use of recyclable material at design stage, use of innovative material during manufacturing and maximize the use of local skills.