Abstract:
Owing to major worldwide issues like global warming, carbon footprint, natural
resource depletion, etc., Sustainable Development (SD) has become an imperative topic of
the current era, specifically in the construction industry due to its drastic impacts on
resource usage and their depletion. Geotechnical engineering, being preliminary in any
construction project, is of paramount importance for practicing sustainable development.
Moreover, assessment of construction activities from the beginning is essential to
determine their impacts on economy, society, and environment i.e., three pillars of
sustainability. Therefore, to incorporate sustainability in geotechnical engineering, an
indicator-based sustainability assessment tool called Geotechnical Sustainability
Assessment Tool (Geo-SAT) was developed. Geo-SAT considers all its indicators generic
and equal in weightage which results in skewness. Thus, the tool does not reflect the true
effect of indicators on sustainability for any construction project. This creates a need for
tool normalization in terms of scale. In this research, 32 engineering specific, out of 171
indicators of Geo-SAT have been scale-normalized using Multiple Criteria Decision
Analysis (MCDA) technique. MCDA implies experts’ opinion in decision making which
incorporated the grass-root level effects of sampled indicators for achieving sustainability.
A questionnaire is developed for this purpose to record the experts’ assigned weightages
for indicators across project life cycle stages of feasibility, design, award, mobilization,
construction and monitoring. Multiple Attribute Value Theory (MAVT), a sub-technique
under MCDA, is then used for analysis as it provides pairwise comparison between
indicators and project life cycle stages. Using the resulted weighted averages, the existing
Geo-SAT is normalized to an improved metric for the sustainability assessment of sixXI
different construction projects of geotechnical importance i.e., dams, tunnels, slope
stability, bridges, buildings, and pavements. The indicator of ‘quality control during
construction’ weighted highest among all sampled indicators for all the project types with
weighted percentages of 4.8%, 5.2%, 6.0%, 6.0%, 6.3% 6.4% for dams, tunnels, slope
stability, bridges, buildings and pavements respectively. Likewise, certain project specific
indicators are categorized under scale normalized Geo-SAT. These percentile and project
specification of indicators will increase the reliability and reduce skewness of sustainability
assessment and development.
