Developing an integrated index to assess social sustainability in construction industry using fuzzy logic

Abstract A sustainable construction ought to enhance the quality of social, economic and environmental practices by determining the current sustainability level and identifying the weak points and consequently improving them. Even though so many studies have been carried out the context of economic and environments in construction projects, less attention was always paid to the social aspect of the construction projects. In this article, a novel construction social sustainability performance evaluation is presented based on fuzzy logic to evaluate the current social sustainability status in associated construction. This study originally adds to the state-of-the-art literature on sustainable construction by articulating a proposal and applications of a new as fuzzy construction social sustainability index. Critical social sustainability attributes are collected from the literature review and expert's judgments to address main dimensions and enablers of construction projects. The proposed index is validated by both triangular fuzzy and crisp approaches, and the results showed that all approaches lead to the same conclusions. Fuzzy performance importance index is then obtained and ranked for all attributes to identify obstacles and challenges behind the social sustainable construction concept. The scientific value of the proposed model is determined by its proper contribution in computing the new index with trapezoidal fuzzy principles and identifying the obstacles of associated construction.