Multi-attribute decision making in choosing suitable construction waste management methods

Construction waste is a major source of urban waste received at many landfill sites around the world. A number of waste management methods have been in use to deal with the substantial amounts of various kinds of construction waste in order to relieve the heavy waste burden in many cities. To achieve sustainability in urban development, different waste management methods should be carefully examined taking into consideration various attributes, for example, financial cost, lost energy, and accessibility and reliability of technologies. In evaluating these attributes, some can be represented by numerical values while others expressed in linguistic variables due to the human being's inability to assess these complicated attributes. The utility-based model proposed in this paper enables computing with words without much loss of information, overcomes the gap between numerical values and linguistic description, employs utility functions to transform multiple scales of different attributes into a common scale for easy comparison, and finally chooses the appropriate waste management methods for different kinds of construction waste.