Materials Selection for Sustainability in the Built Environment : Environmental, Social and Economic Aspects

Materials Selection for Sustainability in the Built Environment: Environmental, Social and Economic Aspects presents the current state-of-the-art when it comes to the decision-making process for choosing construction materials to deliver sustainable construction projects. Aspects covered include the science of enhanced decision-making via operational research and machine learning techniques and how this can be implemented in various disciplines such as architecture, engineering and construction. To this end, the book discusses environmental, economic and social aspects in assessing construction materials and presents different tools and methods that can benefit and facilitate this process.

Finally, the book reviews previous publications on construction material selection and presents essential discussions on the role professionals, researchers, contractors and governments play in making more sustainable decisions on the built environment.

• Presents a lifecycle management-based, systematic and integrated approach for sustainable construction materials selection
• Discusses the impact of materials selection, covering every aspect of sustainability (environmental, social and economic aspects)
• Looks at the concept of the circular economy
• Provides case studies on decision-making methods in combination with lifecycle sustainability assessments

Assed N. Haddad is a Full Professor and Head of the Construction Engineering Department at the Universidade Federal of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has experience in civil, environmental and production Engineering. He has been guest editor for the International Journal of Construction Management, the Infrastructures Journal, and the Sustainability Journal. Prof Haddad is author of more than 250 papers in journals and peer-reviewed conferences. He has also published numerous book chapters and edited books. As a Professional Engineer, he is registered as a Civil and Safety Engineer in Brazil and has performed works in both Brazil and the USA.

Ahmed WA Hammad is coordinator for the Master’s in Construction Project Management at the Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW Sydney. His research focuses on the use of technology, including Building Information Modeling (BIM) and machine-learning-based operational research (OR) methods for enhancing decision-making in construction. His past work has included novel approaches to solving OR problems in construction, including the site layout planning problem, facility location problem, the network design problem, vehicle routing problem (VRP), building and interior space layout planning, and urban planning. Dr Hammad’s expertise lies in developing Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) Models, and Bi-level Programming Models, together with accompanying exact solution approaches for large scale instances. He has an extensive industry background in digital engineering, road design, construction engineering and interior design.

Karoline Figueiredo holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and a master’s degree in Environmental Engineering, both from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. She was a Visiting Researcher at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain, in 2017 and at Western Sydney University, Australia, in 2018, and in both situations, she developed research in the life cycle assessment of construction materials. She is currently a doctoral student, and her research focuses on improving the selection of construction materials to generate less environmental, social, and economic impacts. She has expertise in Sustainable Construction and has developed projects based on Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA).