• Energy Research

The requisition for maintainable constructions has been greatly raising over the last several years. To fulfil the maintainability necessities of a construction, decisions or changes must be done to a construction in the course of the preconstruction and design steps. This can be plausible utilizing building information modelling. To indicate the utilize of building information modelling in maintainable planning, an example nursing-house is received for modelling research. The energy efficiency of nursing-home is analysed utilizing Autodesk Revit and Green Building Studio simulation which contained different characteristics such as annual heating and cooling loads, annual energy usage. Through using the utilize of different building, insulation and roof materials in the nursing-home modelling, the nursing-home modelling is changed into a greener construction modelling. In addition, the effects of using green walls on the facade of the building on the energy performance were analysed. Utilizing simulation, the utilize of non-natural sources can be dramatically decreased through substituting for them with the utilize of sustainable natural sources by that means energy saving. Building information modelling has substantiated to be effective in providing maintainability with alternative material’s assessment and earlier decision-making. Furthermore, this study employed an integrated new MCDM model to evaluate the performance of four natural stones for utilize in a nursing home setting.

Most methodological areas assume common serious reflections to certify difficult study and publication practices, and, therefore, approval in their area. Interestingly, relatively little attention has been paid to reviewing the application of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) in environmental sustainability problems despite the growing number of publications in the past two decades. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to fill this gap by conducting a wide search in two main databases including Web of Science and Scopus to identify the studies which used SEM techniques in the period from 2005 to 2016. A critical analysis of these articles addresses some important key issues. On the basis of our results, we present comprehensive guidelines to help researchers avoid general pitfalls in using SEM. The results of this review are important and will help researchers to better develop research models based on SEM in the area of environmental sustainability.

During the past two decades of e-commerce growth, the concept of a business model has become increasingly popular. More recently, the research on this realm has grown rapidly, with diverse research activity covering a wide range of application areas. Considering the sustainable development goals, the innovative business models have brought a competitive advantage to improve the sustainability performance of organizations. The concept of the sustainable business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value, in economic, social, cultural, or other contexts, in a sustainable way. The process of sustainable business model construction forms an innovative part of a business strategy. Different industries and businesses have utilized sustainable business models’ concept to satisfy their economic, environmental, and social goals simultaneously. However, the success, popularity, and progress of sustainable business models in different application domains are not clear. To explore this issue, this research provides a comprehensive review of sustainable business models literature in various application areas. Notable sustainable business models are identified and further classified in fourteen unique categories, and in every category, the progress -either failure or success- has been reviewed, and the research gaps are discussed. Taxonomy of the applications includes innovation, management and marketing, entrepreneurship, energy, fashion, healthcare, agri-food, supply chain management, circular economy, developing countries, engineering, construction and real estate, mobility and transportation, and hospitality. The key contribution of this study is that it provides an insight into the state of the art of sustainable business models in various application areas and future research directions. This paper concludes that popularity and the success rate of sustainable business models in all application domains have been increased along with the increasing use of advanced technologies.

The main objective of this paper is to present a systematic review of the VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method in several application areas such as sustainability and renewable energy. This study reviewed a total of 176 papers, published in 2004 to 2015, from 83 high-ranking journals; most of which were related to Operational Research, Management Sciences, decision making, sustainability and renewable energy and were extracted from the “Web of Science and Scopus” databases. Papers were classified into 15 main application areas. Furthermore, papers were categorized based on the nationalities of authors, dates of publications, techniques and methods, type of studies, the names of the journals and studies purposes. The results of this study indicated that more papers on VIKOR technique were published in 2013 than in any other year. In addition, 13 papers were published about sustainability and renewable energy fields. Furthermore, VIKOR and fuzzy VIKOR methods, had the first rank in use. Additionally, the Journal of Expert Systems with Applications was the most significant journal in this study, with 27 publications on the topic. Finally, Taiwan had the first rank from 22 nationalities which used VIKOR technique.

As an attractive generalization of the intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS), q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (q-ROFS) provides the decision makers (DMs) with a wide window for preference elicitation. Previous studies on q-ROFS indicate that there is an urge for a decision framework which can make use of the available information in a proper manner for making rational decisions. Motivated by the superiority of q-ROFS, in this paper, a new decision framework is proposed, which provides scientific methods for multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM). Initially, a programming model is developed for calculating weights of attributes with the help of partially known information. Later, another programming model is developed for determining the weights of DMs with the help of partially known information. Preferences from different DMs are aggregated rationally by using the weights of DMs and extending generalized Maclaurin symmetric mean (GMSM) operator to q-ROFS, which can properly capture the interrelationship among attributes. Further, complex proportional assessment (COPRAS) method is extended to q-ROFS for prioritization of objects by using attributes’ weight vector and aggregated preference matrix. The applicability of the proposed framework is demonstrated by using a renewable energy source prioritization problem from an Indian perspective. Finally, the superiorities and weaknesses of the framework are discussed in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.

The construction industry is known as a hazardous industry because of its complexity and strategic nature. Therefore, it is important to know the main causes of occupational accidents to prevent fatal occupational accidents in construction industry. At building construction sites, workers performing tasks are continuously exposed to risks, not only emerging from their own mistakes but also from the mistakes of their co-workers. A great deal of studies investigating risks and preventing occupational hazards for the construction industry has been carried out in the literature. The quantitative conventional methods mostly use either probabilistic techniques or statistics, or both, but they have limitations dealing with the ambiguity and fuzziness in information. In this study, to overcome these limitations, an applicable and improved approach, which helps construction managers to propose preventive measures for accidents on construction sites, is proposed to simplify the risk assessment. It is shown that the Fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method can evaluate causal factors of occupational hazards by a cause–effect diagram and improve certain safety measures on construction sites. In addition, sensitivity analysis is conducted to verify the robustness of the results.