Comparative study of multiple criteria decision making methods for building design

In this paper, multiple criteria decision making methods are studied in the context of building design. The approach is to compare the functionality and the results provided by different methods on three test problems that represent various design situations. The number of criteria in the test problems are two, three and four. Multicriteria optimization is applied to generate the alternatives, among which a preferred solution is to be searched by the decision making methods. Six methods have been selected for comparison: the weighted sum method, the weighted product method, VIKOR, TOPSIS, PROMETHEE II, and a procedure based on the PEG-theorem. The numerical study on the test problems indicate that in most cases, the methods provide different solutions. The PEG-procedure tends to find a well-balanced solution, where none of the criteria is emphasized. While the best MCDM method is not discovered in the study, information about the performance of the methods in building design problems is presented. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.