Benchmarking Material Use Efficiency for Building Projects

Abstract

Reducing the quantities of engineered materials provides a significant opportunity to mitigate the environmental impacts caused by material production and processing. Although the efficient use of materials in building construction has been emphasized, there has been little attention given to measuring the material use efficiency (MUE) of a project. This research fulfills this gap by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) as a benchmarking tool to generate an overall perspective on the MUE and to further compare its efficiency with that of peer projects, thereby promoting enhanced efficiency through target setting. In this research, MUE was measured by adopting the quantities of a variety of materials consumed during construction as input variables and the floor area of a built facility as an output variable. To generate a reliable MUE performance, a stepwise variable selection process was applied and then the performance was ranked based on evaluating cross-efficiency. In addition, clustering analysis and DEA were fused to enable a more realistic target to be set for each input, thereby determining practical targets for each underperforming project. It is anticipated that the proposed MUE benchmarking model would enable projects to recognize the gap with the best-performing projects and help them determine the targets to focus on to become efficient.

Keywords

• material use efficiency
• data envelopment analysis
• benchmarking
• target setting