Multi-Criteria Decision-Making in Sustainability Assessment
Summary
Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) encompasses a family of analytical approaches designed to structure complex choices by evaluating multiple, often conflicting, criteria concurrently. In the context of sustainability assessment, these methods enable decision-makers to balance environmental responsibility, social equity and economic viability. By transforming qualitative judgements into quantitative weights, MCDM techniques provide transparent and reproducible frameworks for prioritising policy options, infrastructure investments and supply-chain strategies. They accommodate diverse stakeholder perspectives and can integrate complementary tools such as life-cycle assessment, network analysis and fuzzy-set theory. Over the past decade, advances have focused on reducing cognitive load on experts, improving consistency checks in pairwise comparisons and extending classical approaches to group settings. These developments have broadened the applicability of MCDM to domains as varied as renewable energy planning, urban mobility and sustainable architecture, reinforcing its global significance and real-world impact.
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Multi-Criteria Decision-Making in Sustainability Assessment publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in multi-criteria decision-making in sustainability assessment across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM): A suite of quantitative and qualitative methods for evaluating and ranking alternatives against multiple decision criteria.
Best-Worst Method (BWM): An MCDM technique in which experts identify the most and least important criteria and make pairwise comparisons to derive criterion weights with minimal inputs.
Parsimonious Best-Worst Method (P-BWM): A streamlined variant of BWM that further reduces the number of pairwise judgements by focusing comparisons on a limited set of reference criteria.
Group Best-Worst Method (G-BWM): An extension of BWM that aggregates assessments from several decision-makers to produce a collective weighting of criteria.
Sustainability Assessment: The process of evaluating the environmental, social and economic impacts of policies, projects or products to support balanced and responsible decision-making.
References
- Decoding rail derailments: Unraveling the weighted factors influencing safety and sustainability using the best-worst method. Results in Engineering (2024).
- Consistency issues in the best worst method: Measurements and thresholds. Omega (2020).
- A Hybrid Fuzzy BWM-COPRAS Method for Analyzing Key Factors of Sustainable Architecture. Sustainability (2018).
- A Novel Approach for Group Decision Making Based on the Best–Worst Method (G-BWM): Application to Supply Chain Management. Mathematics (2021).
- A Novel Parsimonious Best Worst Method for Evaluating Travel Mode Choice. IEEE Access (2023).
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