Combination of the Modified TOPSIS and ITARA in Housing Assistance and Building Assessments

Abstract

Man-made and natural disasters destroy the buildings and render their habitable and operational functionalities unsafe and inappropriate. Thus, stakeholders shall respond to these catastrophes, assess their damages and assign suitable measures to overcome them. Despite several constraints in their implementations, multi-criteria decision-making is of paramount necessity to bridge the gaps between the adopted measures and the requested assistances. Therefore, this thesis will focus on the selection of criteria to conduct the objective and professional assessment. Chapter 1 will underline the topic importance and the primordiality to create a unified guideline for DMs to test the properties and help their residents. Therefore, chapter 2 reviews the numerous approaches and articles to specify their failures in satisfying the stakeholders and contribute in a JIT support. The condition assessments classes and types differ among fields and properties; thus, DMs shall apply the appropriate and accurate tool in examining and scoring their distresses. In the light of multiple techniques, extensions and combinations, this document introduced the first combined method, ITARA-R- modified TOPSIS, for weights eliciting, consistent buildings assessing and categorizing. The R-TOPSIS grants the accuracy and independence from rank reversal problems. Chapter 3 prepared the MCDM process by evaluating the current tools and techniques and result in the creation of a new MCDM modular approach. Thereafter, the modification of this classical TOPSIS approach by adding threshold alternatives discriminates among housing assistance classifications. On the other hand, the thresholds are also determined in weights allocations as well via the indifference threshold-based attribute ratio analysis. The proposed method is based on indifference thresholds and threshold alternatives scores on the selected. The assessment and evaluation of the previous publications and papers resulted in detecting the gaps in their approach and to orient the DMs toward a reliable yet flexible MCDM extension. Thereafter, its application prior Beirut blasts damaged buildings validate its contribution in the decision-making field and investigates its methods’ performance. The results validate its goals satisfactions and accomplishments; hence, modification of the combined tools enables its application for multiple catastrophes, situations, assets and stakeholders. Chapter 4 and 5 validate the work efficacity and flexibility and introduce a new methodology in housing support.