Sustainable Decision-Making in Civil Engineering, Construction and Building Technology

TLDR

Sustainable decision‑making in civil engineering, construction and building technology can be supported by fundamental scientific achievements and multiple‑criteria decision‑making theories. This paper reviews the state of the art of theoretical methods used to support sustainable evaluation and selection processes in civil engineering. The review draws exclusively from Clarivate Web of Science core collection papers, analyzing 2015‑2017 journal articles in civil and construction engineering, and categorizing them by publication period, author country, institution, journal, research domain, problem, and decision‑making approach. MCDM applications have grown steadily, especially in the past three years, underscoring their strong potential for sustainable decision‑making in civil engineering, construction and building technology.

Abstract

Sustainable decision-making in civil engineering, construction and building technology can be supported by fundamental scientific achievements and multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) theories. The current paper aims at overviewing the state of the art in terms of published papers related to theoretical methods that are applied to support sustainable evaluation and selection processes in civil engineering. The review is limited solely to papers referred to in the Clarivate Analytic Web of Science core collection database. As the focus is on multiple-criteria decision-making, it aims at reviewing how the papers on MCDM developments and applications have been distributed by period of publishing, by author countries and institutions, and by journals. Detailed analysis of 2015–2017 journal articles from two Web of Science categories (engineering civil and construction building technology) is presented. The articles are grouped by research domains, problems analyzed and the decision-making approaches used. The findings of the current review paper show that MCDM applications have been constantly growing and particularly increased in the last three years, confirming the great potential and prospects of applying MCDM methods for sustainable decision-making in civil engineering, construction and building technology.