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A case study has been chosen to impart a better understanding of the sustainable multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach for the selection of sustainable construction materials described in Chapter 4. The timber–concrete composite (TCC) floor system is a competent floor system that can take full advantage of the mechanical properties of both concrete and timber. Designing sustainable TCC floors involves several conflicting design criteria that must be considered simultaneously. The case study demonstrates an MCDM approach for weighting and ranking alternative TCC floors at the design stage. To set the criteria weights, a short survey was conducted on technical and production managers at industrialized house-building companies in both the Swedish and European markets. According to the MCDM results, the TCC floor with a 7.3m span length belonging to comfort class A has the highest ranking and was chosen for the detail design stage as the results of the case study.

The demand for a sustainable built environment is no longer a matter of personal choice, and sustainability performances need to be integrated within all activities in the construction projects. Growing performance objectives, including sustainability with several conflicting performance criteria, impose the application of tools based on a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach for ranking and selecting sustainable building materials to consider all performance criteria simultaneously. Because both weights of criteria and sensitivity of decisions significantly influence the outcome of the decision-making process, it is important to pay particular attention to both the consistency of judgments by the experts in the field and sensitivity analysis. MCDM approach must allow interfacing with other engineering tools to evaluate performance metrics. This chapter examines the process of ranking and selecting sustainable building materials using the MCDM approach and illustrates how sustainability performance can be integrated into the materials selection process for construction projects.