A procedure for multi-criteria selection of building assemblies

During some of the different building design stages, typical construction materials/components are often grouped together to form what is called building assemblies. One of the most important tasks in the design development stage of building design is the selection of the appropriate building assemblies to be used in the various elements of the building, e.g. walls, roofs, floors and so on. This decision will have a significant impact on the performance of the building with respect to the various design criteria. Although this decision cannot be entirely separated from other design stages, the use of decision-making techniques can render this a more rational decision. In this paper, a computer tool is developed for selecting the best combination of building assemblies for each particular design situation. The tool utilizes some of the existing decision-making models in a single comprehensive procedure. In the described procedure, the building assemblies are selected by finding a trade-off between a set of designer-specified criteria. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is used to determine the relative importance weights for the different criteria. In addition, various methods for determining an aggregated criteria performance for each alternative solution is described. A heuristic algorithm is used to search for the best assembly combination among the different building assemblies. A computer prototype that implements the selection procedure is developed in Visual Basic as an add-in to AutoCad. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.