Srijit Biswas

Fuzzy TOPSIS based holistic assessment of regions: context of India

Purpose There is a tremendous growth of housing stock with subsequent resource consumption due to rapid urbanization. Most of the existing small-scale constructions have no planning, leading to both environmental degradation and negligible resilience to hazards. The contemporary sustainability and green building concepts are difficult to apply to small individual housing units but a collective regional assessment can be made. The regulatory bodies need to assess regions for resiliency and sustainability to prioritize fund allocation. Due to varying housing typologies and unaccounted resource consumption, reliable spatial information/data are not available to quantify risks and sustainability. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The fuzzy logic approach has been used here to propose a regional assessment factor to give a coarse relative status of each region (and not individual houses). The criterion considered incorporates both hazard safety and environmental aspects. Findings A model of fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution based on experts’ linguistic opinions has been designed with appropriate negations for prioritizing regions. Originality/value This paper anticipates that apart from pressing the need for increasing resilience to hazards, this simplified opinion-based tool will assist the government and administrators to prioritize and strategize their funds/efforts toward achieving safety and sustainability. Depending on the evaluation and assessment, specific retrofits can be planned and executed. The assessment may be used by NGOs working in housing sector and architects and engineering professionals or academicians.