Comparative Evaluation of Sustainable Design Based on Step-Wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and Best Worst Method (BWM) Methods: A Perspective on Household Furnishing Materials

For a few years, there has been an increasing consciousness to design structures that are concurrently economic and environmentally responsive. Eco-friendly inferences of building designs include lower energy consumption, reduction in CO2 emissions, assimilated energy in buildings and enhancement of indoor air quality. With the aim of fulfilling design objectives, designers normally encounter a situation in which the selection of the most appropriate material from a set of various material alternatives is essential. Sustainability has been developing as a new concept in all human activities to create a better balance between social, environmental and economic issues. Designing materials based on the sustainability concept is a key step to enable a better balance because there is no need to re-structure phases and procedures to make the system more efficient in comparison to previous models. Some of the most commonly used materials are household furnishing materials, which can be electrical devices, kitchen gears or general furnishing materials. The volume of production and consumption of these materials is considerable, therefore a newer sustainable plan for a better designed system is justifiable. In the literature, the application of multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) methods has been found to be very suitable for evaluating materials and developing general plans for them. This study contributes by applying two approaches based on MADM methods for weighting the criteria related to the sustainable design of household furnishing materials. Step-Wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and Best Worst Method (BWM) are two specialized and new methods for weighting criteria with different approaches. This paper has not only investigated the weighting of important and related criteria for sustainable design but has also evaluated the similarities and differences between the considered weighting methods. A comparative study of SWARA and BWM methods has never been conducted to date. The results show that, except pairwise comparisons, SWARA and BWM are certainly similar and in some cases SWARA can be more accurate and effective.

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