Evaluation of selection criteria for school buildings in Canada using AHP and MAUT

The construction of any building's structure and envelope has become easy to achieve, yet the selection of a favourable, most-suitable alternative from sustainability and LCC points of view has become the new challenge. The selection of the structure type or the construction material is often decided based on personal experience or perception, or it could be accomplished by a random untested method that is not evaluated for high performance and sustainability. Two groups of criteria are investigated in this paper; The first group of criteria is life-cycle costs, including the initial costs, running costs (operating and maintenance costs), environmental impact costs, and salvage values while the second group contains expressions of sustainability principles. Decision makers' opinions in Canadian school boards were gathered by designing a web-based questionnaire to determine the relative weights for the various selection criteria that could govern the selection of structure and envelope types for new school buildings. These weights are determined using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), applied with the Eigen-vector technique. The second objective of the survey is to determine the preference utility values for the different criteria by applying the Multi Attributes Utility Theory (MAUT) approach. The result of the conducted evaluation indicates that running costs represent the most significant criterion, followed by initial costs and then sustainability.