Abstract
For a few years, there has been an increasing consciousness to design structures that are concurrently economic and environmentally responsive. Eco-friendly inferences of building designs include lower energy consumption, reduction in CO2 emissions, assimilated energy in buildings and enhancement of indoor air quality. With the aim of fulfilling design objectives, designers normally encounter a situation in which the selection of the most appropriate material from a set of various material alternatives is essential. Sustainability has been developing as a new concept in all human activities to create a better balance between social, environmental and economic issues. Designing materials based on the sustainability concept is a key step to enable a better balance because there is no need to re-structure phases and procedures to make the system more efficient in comparison to previous models. Some of the most commonly used materials are household furnishing materials, which can be electrical devices, kitchen gears or general furnishing materials. The volume of production and consumption of these materials is considerable, therefore a newer sustainable plan for a better designed system is justifiable. In the literature, the application of multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) methods has been found to be very suitable for evaluating materials and developing general plans for them. This study contributes by applying two approaches based on MADM methods for weighting the criteria related to the sustainable design of household furnishing materials. Step-Wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and Best Worst Method (BWM) are two specialized and new methods for weighting criteria with different approaches. This paper has not only investigated the weighting of important and related criteria for sustainable design but has also evaluated the similarities and differences between the considered weighting methods. A comparative study of SWARA and BWM methods has never been conducted to date. The results show that, except pairwise comparisons, SWARA and BWM are certainly similar and in some cases SWARA can be more accurate and effective.
Highlights
Rapid movements of a large number of populations from rural to urban areas and socio-economic changes that transform the agricultural human society into an industrial society, involving the extensive economic re-organization intensify the rate of resource deficiency and ecological contamination globally.Due to uncontrolled urbanization, environmental degradation has been occurring very quickly, causingSymmetry 2019, 11, 74; doi:10.3390/sym11010074 www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetrySymmetry 2019, 11, 74 land insecurity, water quality degradation and air and noise pollution, along with severe waste disposal issues
This research focuses on a comparative study on criteria weight estimation using Step-Wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and Best Worst Method (BWM) methods for sustainable household furnishing material selection problem
This part is designed according to the available literature and adopted methodologies to assess the outputs of SWARA and BWM methods
Summary
Rapid movements of a large number of populations from rural to urban areas and socio-economic changes that transform the agricultural human society into an industrial society, involving the extensive economic re-organization intensify the rate of resource deficiency and ecological contamination globally.Due to uncontrolled urbanization, environmental degradation has been occurring very quickly, causingSymmetry 2019, 11, 74; doi:10.3390/sym11010074 www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetrySymmetry 2019, 11, 74 land insecurity, water quality degradation and air and noise pollution, along with severe waste disposal issues. Interior designers have incredible influence by deciding the types of materials and products to be used to make a viable, endurable and ecologically-clean living environment. The interior designing job has been confined to conformist practice, focusing only on style and extravagant design while ignoring energy savings, toxic emissions, the harmful effects on customers’ psychophysical health, and environmental pollution. Recent trends in interior design have seen a spectacular move towards design policies that focus on the creation of art, beauty and taste, and a healthy and sustainable environment for consumers to live and work in [2]. Sustainability is a big trend in today’s construction industry for energy use, resource efficiency, material selection, safety and life-cycle management, for developing an environmentally responsible environment
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