Abstract
The project selection process is a crucial step in sustainable development. Effective sustainable development depends on the ability to select the appropriate sustainable project to implement to ensure that the desired goals are met. Some of the most common characteristics or criteria used in evaluating sustainable projects include novelty, uncertainty, skill and experience, technology information transfer, and project cost. Prioritizing these criteria based on relative importance helps project managers and decision makers identify elements that require additional attention, better allocate resources, as well as improve the selection process when evaluating different sustainable project alternatives. The aim of this research is to use the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) methodology in which fuzzy numbers are utilized to realistically represent human judgment to rank the different project criteria based on relative importance and impact on sustainable projects. The results from the FAHP show that the most important criterion to consider in sustainable project selection is project cost, followed by novelty and uncertainty as the second and third most important criteria, respectively. The two least important criteria out of the total of five examined in this research were the skill and experience and technology information transfer, respectively. These results will help project managers and decision makers identify selection criteria with higher weights of importance. Given that the selection criteria chosen for this research are not limited to the evaluation of a specific type of sustainable projects or a specific location, they can be used to evaluate different types of sustainable projects in different environments and locations.
Recommended Citation
R. Alyamani and S. Long, "The Application of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process in Sustainable Project Selection," Sustainability, vol. 12, no. 20, pp. 1 - 16, MDPI, Oct 2020.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.3390/su12208314
Department(s)
Engineering Management and Systems Engineering
Research Center/Lab(s)
INSPIRE - University Transportation Center
Keywords and Phrases
Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process; Multi-criteria decision making; Project selection; Sustainable projects
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
2071-1050
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2020 The Authors, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publication Date
09 Oct 2020
Included in
Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons, Structural Engineering Commons
Comments
This research is partially funded by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission (SACM) and the Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Department at Missouri University of Science & Technology.