A Review of Multicriteria Assessment Techniques Applied to Sustainable Infrastructure Design

Abstract

Given the great impacts associated with the construction and maintenance of infrastructures in both the environmental, the economic and the social dimensions, a sustainable approach to their design appears essential to ease the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. Multicriteria decision-making methods are usually applied to address the complex and often conflicting criteria that characterise sustainability. The present study aims to review the current state of the art regarding the application of such techniques in the sustainability assessment of infrastructures, analysing as well the sustainability impacts and criteria included in the assessments. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is the most frequently used weighting technique. Simple Additive Weighting has turned out to be the most applied decision-making method to assess the weighted criteria. Although a life cycle assessment approach is recurrently used to evaluate sustainability, standardised concepts, such as cost discounting, or presentation of the assumed functional unit or system boundaries, as required by ISO 14040, are still only marginally used. Additionally, a need for further research in the inclusion of fuzziness in the handling of linguistic variables is identified.