Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Heritage Building Management

Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) has emerged as a cornerstone methodology in the management of heritage buildings, where interventions must reconcile conservation, functional adaptation and sustainability. This approach integrates quantitative environmental and economic metrics with qualitative assessments of cultural significance, stakeholder values and regulatory constraints. Contemporary frameworks combine life-cycle analyses, digital data environments and participatory workshops to structure complex decisions into hierarchical criteria sets. Practitioners employ weighting schemes to reflect relative priorities—such as structural safety, authenticity and energy performance—and apply algorithmic tools to rank renovation, reuse and maintenance alternatives. Key developments include the incorporation of uncertainty modelling, via fuzzy logic methods, and the adoption of network-based processes that account for interdependencies among heritage values, technical feasibility and community impact. Such MCDM frameworks have demonstrated global relevance, guiding interventions in industrial, residential and vernacular contexts, and supporting policies that balance cost–benefit optimisation with cultural continuity. By fostering transparent, reproducible and participatory decision paths, MCDM advances both theoretical rigour and practical efficiency in heritage building management.

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Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Heritage Building Management publication trend

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Technical terms

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM): A set of analytical methods for evaluating and prioritising alternatives based on multiple, often conflicting criteria.

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP): A hierarchical weighting and ranking technique that decomposes a decision problem into criteria and subcriteria and derives priority scales from pairwise comparisons.

Analytic Network Process (ANP): An extension of AHP that incorporates interdependencies and feedback among decision elements, allowing for more complex relationship modelling.

TOPSIS: A technique for ranking alternatives by measuring their distances to an ideal positive solution and an ideal negative solution within a criteria space.

Fuzzy TOPSIS: A variant of TOPSIS that employs fuzzy set theory to accommodate ambiguity and uncertainty in the assessment of criteria values.

References

1. Life cycle assessment and multi-criteria decision-making for sustainable building parts: criteria, methods, and application. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment (2024).
2. Multicriteria Model for Determining the Best and Low-Cost Methods of Industrial Heritage Transformation and Utilization under Fuzzy Inputs. Sustainability (2023).
3. Comparative Analysis of Multi-Criteria Methods for the Enhancement of Historical Buildings. Sustainability (2019).