abstract: Comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) evaluates the relative performance of multiple products, services, or technologies with the purpose of selecting the least impactful alternative. Nevertheless, characterized results are seldom conclusive. When one alternative performs best in some aspects, it may also performs worse in others. These tradeoffs among different impact categories make it difficult to identify environmentally preferable alternatives. To help reconcile this dilemma, LCA analysts have the option to apply normalization and weighting to generate comparisons based upon a single score. However, these approaches can be misleading because they suffer from problems of reference dataset incompletion, linear and fully compensatory aggregation, masking of salient tradeoffs, weight insensitivity and difficulties incorporating uncertainty in performance assessment and weights. Consequently, most LCA studies truncate impacts assessment at characterization, which leaves decision-makers to confront highly uncertain multi-criteria problems without the aid of analytic guideposts. This study introduces Stochastic Multi attribute Analysis (SMAA), a novel approach to normalization and weighting of characterized life-cycle inventory data for use in comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The proposed method avoids the bias introduced by external normalization references, and is capable of exploring high uncertainty in both the input parameters and weights. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Civil and Environmental Engineering 2015

There has been an increasing relevance of the cultural sector in the economic and social development of different countries. However, this sector continues without much input from multi-criteria decision-making (MDCM) techniques and sustainability analysis, which are widely used in other sectors. This paper proposes an MCDM model to assess the sustainability of a musical institution’s program. To define the parameters of the proposed model, qualitative interviews with relevant representatives of Catalan cultural institutions and highly recognized professionals in the sector were performed. The content of the 2015–2016 season of the ‘Palau de la Música Catalana’, a relevant Catalan musical institution located in Barcelona, was used as a case study to empirically test the method. The method allows the calculation of a season value index (SVI), which serves to make more sustainable decisions on musical season programs according to the established criteria. The sensitivity analysis carried out for different scenarios shows the robustness of the method. The research suggests that more complex decision settings, such as MCDM methods that are widely used in other sectors, can be easily applied to the sustainable management of any type of cultural institution. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this method was never applied to a cultural institution and with real data. / Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

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<p dir="ltr">Appealing to individuals’ social identity is a powerful form of social influence, capable of changing the way people process information, the information they think about, and how they evaluate other people. This form of social influence can function through perceptions of normal behavior within a social group, in which members of a group interpret ambiguous information through the lens of what is considered to be normal in their ingroup. The Social Identity Decision Process hypothesis, based on Social Identity Theory and Probabilistic Persuasion Theory, suggests that group norms associated with a decider's social identity can alter the perceived importance of attributes or cues in a decision environment and the strategies that are used to make choices in situations in which the group identity is salient. Taking the U.S. political landscape as a context and examining Republican and Democrat social identities, norms from these political groups were expected to impact the attributes and strategies partisans use when choosing whether to have solar panels on a house. Two studies are reported that examined these effects through multi-attribute decision making, in which predefined decision process models assessed participant behavior to analyze which attributes best describe participants’ decision making.</p>

Advances in microprocessor and communications technologies are making it possible to deploy advanced traffic signal controllers capable of integrating emergency vehicle preemption and transit priority operations. However, investment planning for such an integrated system is not a trivial task. Investment planning for such a system requires a holistic approach that considers institutional, technical and financial issues from a systems perspective. Two distinct service providers, fire and rescue providers and transit operators, with separate operational functions, objectives, resources and constituents are involved. Performance parameters for the integrated system are not well defined and performance data are often imprecise in nature. Transportation planners and managers interested in deploying integrated emergency vehicle preemption and traffic priority systems do not have an evaluation approach or a common set of performance metrics to make an informed decision. There is a need for a simple structured analytical approach and tools to assess the impacts of an integrated emergency vehicle preemption and transit priority system as part of investment decision making processes. This need could be met with the assistance of a decision support system (DSS) developed to provide planners and managers a simple and intuitive analytical approach to assist in making investment decisions regarding emergency vehicle preemption and transit signal priority. This dissertation has two research goals: (1) to develop a decision support system framework to assess the impacts of advanced traffic signal control systems capable of integrating emergency vehicle preemption and transit signal priority operations for investment planning purposes; and (2) to develop selected analytical tools for incorporation into the decision support system framework. These analytical tools will employ fuzzy sets theory concepts, as well as cost and accident reduction factors. As part of this research, analytical tools to assess impacts on operating cost for transit and fire and rescue providers have been developed. In addition, an analytical tool was developed and employs fuzzy multi-attribute decision making methods to rank alternative transit priority strategies. These analytical tools are proposed for incorporation into the design of a decision support system in the future. / Ph. D.

Ces dernières années, la conception de produit vise de plus en plus à remettre le client aucentre du processus de développement. De nouvelles méthodes et outils ont permis de formaliser nonseulement l’identification des besoins et des attentes du client mais également leur transformation enexigences. Cependant, malgré les progrès récemment apparus dans ce domaine, la notion de valeurperçue par le client qui est associée au produit reste faiblement considérée durant le développement duproduit alors que la perception de cette valeur par le client va jouer un rôle clé au moment du choix duproduit.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une approche normative visant l’intégration de la notion devaleur du produit dans le processus d’établissement des exigences. Un état de l’art présente lesconcepts et les pratiques impliqués dans le déploiement de la fonction de qualité, étroitement liée auprocessus de spécification des exigences basé sur la valeur. Ces concepts sont relatifs aux notionsd’objectifs, de modèles de la valeur, de fonctions d’utilité multi attributs et de hiérarchie et de réseauxd’objectifs.Notre approche se déroule en 4 étapes : (1) identifier et structurer les objectifs à partir del’expression des attentes du client, (2) spécifier les attributs de la valeur perçue par le client etconstruire un modèle de la valeur client, (3) transformer les objectifs en exigences pour construire unmodèle global de la valeur produit et (4) dériver ce modèle global en un modèle de la valeur pourchaque composant du produit. Cette approche permet ainsi de prendre en compte explicitement lavaleur produit perçue par le client en l’intégrant dans les phases de développement, ce qui favorise uneconception proactive dirigée par la valeur.Nous l’illustrons sur un exemple d’avion de ligne développé en Vanguard Studio. Cet exemplea été élaboré par l’ensemble des partenaires au cours du projet Européen IST CRESCENDO et sert decas-test pour ce projet / Recently customer-based product development is becoming a popular paradigm. Customer needsand expectations are identified and transformed into requirements in systematic processes for productdesign with the help of various methods and tools. However, in many cases, these approaches fail tofocus on the perceived value that is crucially important when customers make the decision ofpurchasing a product. The requirements specification derived from these approaches are typicallyvalue-implicit.In this thesis, a prescriptive approach to derive value-based requirements specification is proposedby integrating the concept of value into the house of quality of quality function deployment. Anintegrated set of theories, methods and concepts is introduced in order to mitigate the sevenmethodological problems of house of quality regarding to establishing appropriate value-basedrequirements specification. The foundations of the approach include concepts of objective, valuemodel and consequence model, methods of means-ends objectives network, fundamental objectiveshierarchy, response surface methodology and value-driven design, and theory of multi-attribute utilitytheory. The procedure of the approach is a four-step process: (1) identify and structure objectives frominitial customer statements of expectations, (2) specify attributes and construct customer value model,(3) transform fundamental objectives into engineering characteristics to construct system value model,and (4) derive component value models from system value model. Through this procedure, initialcustomer statements can be reasonably derived into customer value model, system value model andcomponent value model. The benefits of the approach are that it enables (1) reasonably qualifying andquantifying customer value, and performing value modeling and simulation, (2) perceived customervalue being subsequently used reactively for design evaluation, and proactively for value-drivendesign.The approach is applied in the context of a European Community’s R&D project CRESCENDO tohelp constructing airlines’ group value model for commercial aircraft development. This applicationfocuses on the first two-steps of the approach, and the value models are implemented in businesssoftware Vanguard Studio

Proposed in this thesis is a methodology to enable yacht designers to develop innovative structural concepts, even when the loads experienced by the yacht are highly uncertain, and has been implemented in sufficient detail to confirm the feasibility of this new approach. The new approach is required because today??s yachts are generally lighter, getting larger and going faster. The question arises as to how far the design envelope can be pushed with the highly uncertain loads experienced by the structure? What are the effects of this uncertainty and what trade-offs in the structural design will best meet the overall design objectives? The new approach provides yacht designers with a means of developing innovative structural solutions that accommodate high levels of uncertainty, but still focus on best meeting design objectives constrained by trade-offs in weight, safety and cost. The designer??s preferences have a large, and not always intuitive, influence on the necessary design trade-offs. This in turn invites research into ways to formally integrate decision algorithms into knowledge-based design systems. A lean and robust design system has been achieved by developing a set of tools which are blanketed by a fuzzy decision algorithm. The underlying tool set includes costing, material optimisation and safety analysis. Central to this is the innovative way in which the system allows non-discrete variables to be utilized along with new subjective measures of structural reliability based on load path algorithms and topological (shape) optimisation. The originality in this work is the development of a knowledge-based framework and methodology that uses a fuzzy decision making tool to navigate through a design space and address trade-offs between high level objectives when faced with limited design detail and uncertainty. In so doing, this work introduces the use of topological optimisation and load path theory to the structural design of yachts as a means of overcoming the historical focus of knowledge-based systems and to ensure that innovative solutions can still evolve. A sensitivity analysis is also presented which can quantify a design??s robustness in a system that focuses on a global approach to the measurement of objectives such as cost, weight and safety. Results from the application of this system show new and innovative structural solutions evolving that take into account the designers preferences regarding cost, weight and safety while accommodating uncertain parameters such as the loading experienced by the hull.

In the current pluralistic societies, public policy-makings had to take into account various stakeholders as well as the social values. The research, based on the integrated public affairs management¡]PAM¡^ framework (Wang et al., 2004a) and place marketing strategy (Kotler, 1999), defined the applicable operational variables which includes three major factors of economical, social and political, and government, and nine derivative attributes, two situations of direct three-links between Taiwan and Mainland China, and status quo are used as the scenario. Altogether they will influence the stakeholders as decision-makers while deciding if they should invest, live, or work in Kaohsiung. For research design, we employed three major multiple-attribute theories or methods for individual stakeholders¡¦information processing and integration, Information Integration Theory¡]IIT¡^, Analytical Hierarchy Process¡]AHP¡^, Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique¡]SMART¡^, and Rating. In particular, the way the information is integrated cognitively is empirically examined instead of assumed with the averaging model of the IIT (Anderson, 1991a), and the scale values (equivalent to the utility component in MAUT or AHP) and the weights are concurrently separated and measured as results of the examination. Such separation rendered measurement of the psychological weights with theoretical validity possible, and could be used as the standard so that weights measured with the other three methods are evaluated and compared. Findings of the research are as follow, in the aspect of multiple-attribute weight measurement methods applied in the place marketing of Kaohsiung¡G 1. Among the three major factors, the most important is ¡§economic development¡¨, the second is ¡§government function¡¨, and then the third is ¡§social and political development¡¨. 2. For economic development, under the situation of maintain status quo, the most crucial derivative attribute is¡§ the level of economic globalization of Kaohsiung¡¨. The second one is ¡§the industrial structure of Kaohsiung city¡¨. The last one is ¡§the competitiveness of Kaohsiung Port and Airport project¡¨¡FUnder the situation of opening for three direct-links, the most crucial derivative attribute is still ¡§the level of economic globalization of Kaohsiung¡¨. The second one is ¡§the competitiveness of Kaohsiung Port and Airport project¡¨. The last one is ¡§the industrial structure of Kaohsiung city¡¨. 3. For the factor of social and political development, the most important attribute is ¡§the level of citizen participation in public affairs and the extent they influence public policies¡¨, the second is ¡§the public values and culture¡¨, the last is ¡§the operational mechanism of politics and election¡¨. 4. As for government function, the most essential attribute is ¡§the provision of public infrastructures¡¨. The second is ¡§the elected officials¡¦ perception of place marketing and capabilities of policy planning¡¨. The third is¡§the career officials¡¦ identifications for the elected officials¡¦ ambitions and abilities to carry out the place marketing policies¡¨. 5. The second group examinees think that direct-links has positive effects on the developments of Kaohsiung and most of them approve of the policy of three direct-links¡Fthe first group examinees have diverse opinions on it. 6. Based on PAM framework, we will sum up the problems of place marketing of Kaohsiung and brings out policy suggestions for Kaohsiung city. In the aspect of Multiple-attribute weight measurement methods theory¡G 1. Take the weight parameters derived from IIT¡¦s averaging model as the standard, weights from rating¡BAHP and SMART are all theoretically valid. The theoretical validity of rating outperforms that of AHP, AHP outperforms that of SMART. Among the convergence validity or consistence of four methods, between rating and AHP with IIT¡¦s averaging model fit better in convergence validity, between SMART and IIT¡¦s averaging model don¡¦t. 2. All three models had fairly high predictability and notable for subjects¡¦ holistic judgments. The predictability of IIT is the a little bit higher than SMART, the third one is AHP, and the last one is rating. 3. For convergence, measured with accumulative weights derived from subjects selected 15-20 examinees randomly, IIT was better than SMART, and SMART was better than AHP. 4. In terms of perceived performance, degree of operational easiness and fondness, the three models are not significantly different. As for the degree of confidence, IIT outperformed AHP, and AHP outperformed SMART.

The decision-making model was developed that allows solving multi-attribute problems of derelict buildings management from the perspective of sustainable development and under uncertainty. The model deals with the problem of developing the derelict buildings’ redevelopment variants and choosing the most rational one. Planning and technical components of an effective model in conformity with the main principles of sustainable development were proposed. The model of the sustainability indicator system for management of derelict buildings was designed. The developed system was applied to multi-attribute decision-making. A comparative analysis of the results was developed. The model was adjusted for modelling and evaluating the rational management of derelict rural buildings in Lithuania. The facilities of GIS for a spatial decision-making were adjusted to the analyzed problem of sustainable revitalization of derelict buildings.

The decision-making model was developed that allows solving multi-attribute problems of derelict buildings management from the perspective of sustainable development and under uncertainty. The model deals with the problem of developing the derelict buildings’ redevelopment variants and choosing the most rational one. Planning and technical components of an effective model in conformity with the main principles of sustainable development were proposed. The model of the sustainability indicator system for management of derelict buildings was designed. The developed system was applied to multi-attribute decision-making. A comparative analysis of the results was developed. The model was adjusted for modelling and evaluating the rational management of derelict rural buildings in Lithuania. The facilities of GIS for a spatial decision-making were adjusted to the analyzed problem of sustainable revitalization of derelict buildings.