AHP-ANP-Fuzzy Integral Integrated Network for Evaluating Performance of Innovative Business Models for Sustainable Building

Sustainable building (SB) has emerged as an innovative approach to minimizing the resource consumption of buildings. To promote the market uptake of SB, innovative business models (BMs) are needed. However, the adoption of innovative BMs for SB is inhibited by the lack of consistent evaluation of SB's business value and structured selection of appropriate BMs. This paper aims to develop a novel model for evaluating the performance of innovative BMs for SB, and assist SB stakeholders in selecting the most appropriate BM and accelerating the delivery of SB. The research was carried out with the performance evaluation of innovative BMs for SB drawn on academic research and practices internationally. Eight key performance criteria and 33 indicators of BMs for SB were identified through a literature review and a questionnaire survey with 31 stakeholders. The interdependencies among the criteria were also examined through a focus group meeting, which, together with the weights of the criteria, were quantified through six expert interviews with representative stakeholders using integrated analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and analytical network process (ANP) methods. After that, the impacts of the interdependencies on the weights and ultimately on the derived final evaluation scores of BM alternatives were modeled using the nonadditive fuzzy integral method as the information aggregation operator. Four innovative BM alternatives for SB originally developed from real-life international cases from Australia, Singapore, Japan, and the United Kingdom were selected for evaluation using the developed model. The results showed that extended operation and maintenance service was the optimal innovative BM type for developers to deliver SB among the alternatives. This research contributes to a better understanding of BM innovations for SB, and the developed AHP-ANP-fuzzy integral integrated network provides stakeholders a consolidated model for the synthetic evaluation of innovative BMs for SB.