A sustainability assessment model for disaster relief shelter designs using multicriteria decision analysis

• Main Author: De Pedro, John Paul Q.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2023
• Subjects: Emergency housing; Disaster relief; Public shelters; Multiple criteria decision making; Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_civ/29
• Institution: De La Salle University

Disaster relief shelters play an important role in the recovery of displaced populations after a natural disaster as they provide privacy, protection from future hazards, and the promotion of the well-being of the victims. Guidelines have been established for shelter design, and these emphasized different sustainability criteria considered during the design stage. These sustainability criteria include the shelter's environmental, economic, and technical aspects. However, multiple criteria considerations for a design pose a concern during the decision process as they are usually at odds with each other. In this work, a sustainability assessment framework model for disaster relief shelters was developed through multi-criteria decision analysis techniques: Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and VIKOR as weighting and ranking methods, respectively. The shelter’s environmental criteria were evaluated through life cycle assessment, with the inclusion of its circularity potential evaluated using the 3DR method. The economic performance was measured by the shelter’s cost assessment. Lastly, the technical performance of the shelter design was gauged by its risk level against natural hazards. As a test bed for the framework, existing Philippine shelter designs using timber and concrete as structural materials and a proposed new design using cold-formed steel were used as case studies. Results demonstrated that materials used in the shelter considerably influence the environmental impact, circularity potential, and economic aspects of the shelter. In the selection of the design, the stakeholders hold almost equal preferences on both the technical and environmental aspects of the shelter. The VIKOR usage suggested two shelter designs that were identified as compromise solutions: the existing Philippine timber shelter design and a proposed new cold-formed steel-based design.