Commercially Available Materials Selection in Sustainable Design: An Integrated Multi-Attribute Decision Making Approach

Rui Zhao, Han Su, Xiaolang Chen and Yanni Yu
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Rui Zhao: State-Province Joint Engineering Research Lab in Geospatial Information Technology for High Speed Railway Safety, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China
Han Su: State-Province Joint Engineering Research Lab in Geospatial Information Technology for High Speed Railway Safety, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China
Xiaolang Chen: Key Laboratory of Advanced Materials Technology Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China
Yanni Yu: Institute of Resource, Environment and Sustainable Development (IRESD), Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: This paper presents an integrated multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) approach to aid selection of commercially available materials in the context of sustainable design. The MADM couples grey relational analysis (GRA) with an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to rank alternative materials in terms of their economic, environmental, and social performance. AHP is used to determine the corresponding weighting values for the selected indicators. In addition, a case example is used to verify the proposed MADM method and demonstrate its practical application. Three alternative polymer materials, i.e. , poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC), polypropylene (PP), and polyethylene (PE), are examined to determine their sustainability for plastic pipe design. The associated MADM result and the limitations of the approach are discussed to lay the foundation for further improvement.

Keywords: materials selection; multi-attribute decision-making; sustainable design; analytic hierarchy process; grey relational analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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