Assessment of User Comfort Aspects of Industrialized Building Systems using PROMETHEE and Delphi

Abstract

Modern construction methods and systems offer many advantages to project stakeholders. However, the process of decision making of selecting an appropriate system is complicated to clients of large and complex projects. The paper presents the result of the study in selecting a structural system out of five intensively used alternatives based on user comfort performance criteria. The alternatives were evaluated using a Delphi-type technique, because the result will be based on a consensus, and the discussion made during the interviews will provide profounder understanding of alternatives’ priorities. A total of six participants from both academic and the construction industry were invited to carefully examine each alternative from both designer and construction performance point of views. They were asked to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each structural system considering all related factors such as material specifications, system requirements and limitations, and construction performance. The discussion is structured by using a framework consists of four main criteria: exploitation quality and hygiene, thermal and acoustic insulation, psychological issues, and architectural flexibility summarized by a consensus point. The participants also were asked to weight the criteria based on pairwise comparison technique. The alternative priorities and the weighted list of criteria then used as input of PROMETHEE to rank construction methods based on four ‘user comfort’ performance criteria. The result of the study reveals that Light Steel Frame (LSF) was the superior construction method in terms of user comfort performance criteria. The main reasons are that LSF has a higher performance in thermal and acoustic insulation and can be very flexible to various architectural plans. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by utilising a procedure of decision making method to select to an appropriate industrialized building system by examining key factors of user comfort attributes.