Resumen de Mcdm approach for assessing the sustainability of buildings' facades
Construction industry is known to cause major social, economic and environmental impacts on the society so that promoting sustainable construction practice affects positively and allows generating a balance among these pillars. Besides, to achieve sustainability goals in a building project, the stakeholders' needs and expectations have to be met and taken into consideration.
One of the main and largest components of a building, which could highly contribute to the sustainability performance of the whole building is the facade. Previous studies confirmed the predominant role of facades in minimizing environmental effects and decreasing buildings' costs as well as providing comfort for inhabitants.
Despite the impact of facades on sustainability, indicators that govern the performance of the pillars are often dismissed or, if considered, these are rather subjectively measured - especially those associated with the social requirement. On the other hand, the vast majority of the existing tools fail at considering stakeholders' satisfaction in the assessment and selection process of optimal facade systems.
Within this context, a new comprehensive approach to quantify the sustainability index of facade systems including the most representative economic, environmental and social indicators and integrating the stakeholders’ satisfaction was developed.
The approach is based on MIVES (Integrated Value Model for Sustainable Assessment), a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) model, which allows minimizing the subjectivity in the decision-making process and relies on the value function concept.
This new approach was particularly optimized for residential building facades and successfully validated by analyzing five residential facade systems commonly used in Barcelona. The model is applicable for other countries and cities as well. Furthermore, through assessing the sustainability of two real buildings and validating the goodness of the results, the applicability of this approach was demonstrated.
The results proved several capabilities and potentials of the model, these being: (1) quantify, objectively, the sustainability of facade systems from the economic, environmental and social perspectives involving the stakeholders’ preferences and (2), identify strengths and weaknesses of facades that would allow implementing improving measures.
The proposed approach was designed to be a decisive support for decision-making in the field of facade management. Findings confirm that the approach is valuable and suitable for use in practice by public and private stakeholders. Future works could be to develop a digital application for building and architectural offices so that these could consider sustainability in the design, assessment and selection processes of facades to make the best decision. Next research steps could also adapt this approach to other types of buildings in order to move towards more sustainable architecture and construction.
