- Email: [email protected]
Low carbon technology integration innovation assessment index review based on rough set theory – an evidence from construction industry in China
Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro
Low carbon technology integration innovation assessment index review based on rough set theory e an evidence from construction industry in China Xiaodong Lai a, b, *, Jixian Liu a, Georgi Georgiev c a b c
School of Economic and Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China School of Tourism and Urban Management, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, 330013, China Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP, Holzkirchen Branch, Fraunhoferstr. 10, 83626, Valley, Germany
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 10 February 2015 Received in revised form 7 March 2016 Accepted 7 March 2016 Available online 6 April 2016
An adequate response to global climate change and low carbon economy development has become a worldwide concerned subject. As one of the energetically most intensive industries, construction industry is a key area to promote decarbonization, which is an important path to realize national strategic goals on carbon reduction in China. This paper focuses on low carbon technology integration management, and analyzes the existing research status of green building or low carbon buildings on the related evaluation indexes, then proposes an evaluation system framework for the low carbon technology integration innovation from the perspective of the system management. It points out, that the evaluation of low carbon technology innovation should be conducted by a smarter managing of system resource input, the process control and the system comprehensive performance as an output. Furthermore, based on the questionnaire survey and the exploratory factor analysis result on the selected indexes, this paper implements a rough set method to identify the weight of all the indexes and found that:(1) managers focus more on the affordable input of the beginning stage and the management control in the middle period of the innovation, instead on the output performance in the later stage. This indicates, that the management control during the front stages is more essential than this during the later ones; (2) the constructed evaluation framework, from the system perspective, can properly reflect the integrity, multi-level stakeholder structure and technology integration in low carbon projects, which could support the decision-maker into considering the complexity of construction and evaluation of the technology innovation performance from multi-level perspective; (3) the combined methods, adopted with exploratory factor analysis and rough set evaluation to determine the evaluation index and its weights, could well reflect the overall performance of low carbon project evaluation, the selected indicators have certain scientific and practical effectiveness, which could provide references for enterprise on LCT innovation management. as an industry with a multi-level technologies integration, the single Technological adoption or innovation cannot satisfy the economic transformation requirements of the modern construction industry development. An integration innovation management evaluation model is needed for the sustainability evaluation in the construction practice. Its development is the main scientific objective of this study, by taking into consideration the entire life cycle assessment and various other factors. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Construction industry Low carbon technology Integration innovation Rough set System management Index review
1. Introduction
* Corresponding author. School of Economic and Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China. Tel.: þ86 20-39310072, þ86 13922909706 (mobile); fax: þ86 20-39310072; School of Turism and Urban Manageent, Jiangxi University of Finance and Econimic, Nanchang City, China, 330013; Tel: þ86-791 8388507 E-mail address: [email protected] (X. Lai). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.03.035 0959-6526/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
High investment, energy consumption and low added value characteristics of a particular construction project cause an increasing contradiction between the requirements of the society in the current energy crisis and those of the building industries. Currently, the construction energy consumption is responsible for about 1/3 of the total energy consumption in China. This proportion is increasing quickly with the rapid development of the
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
urbanization process (The State Council, 2011). According to the commitment by the Chinese Government to the United Nations, China needs to reduce the intensity of CO2 emissions proportional to the gross domestic production by 40e45% by 2020, compared with the 2005 levels, and released a new set of goals to reduce the number of production facilities with low energy efficiency in the power, coal, charcoal, steel, textile and petrochemical sectors in January 2010 (Xinhuanet, 2009). As a large energy consumption sector, the construction industries are facing great challenges now. Due to the complexity and long life cycles of engineering construction, in order to effectively control CO2 emissions and improve energy efficiency, it requires adopting the effective energy saving technology or low-carbon technologies. A complete set of system management and evaluation mechanisms is quite important here as well. Before the national low-carbon building evaluation system would be released officially, the implementation of low carbon projects or low carbon technology (LCT) innovation mainly relies on the Government's promotion and the enterprise's participation self-consciousness. While the non-standardized evaluation criteria for low carbon buildings are affecting the enthusiasm of enterprises, the continuously exploration on an LCT innovation management performance evaluation system for the construction industry in China becomes particularly necessary.
2. Literature review and analysis There are some different type of outstanding green building evaluation systems internationally, such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) developed by the US Green Building Council (USGBC, 2009); the British Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) published by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) in 1990 (BRE, 2011); the Green Star Certificate (GSC) rating system for buildings launched in 2003 by the Green Building Council of Australia (Yuan et al., 2011); the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen (DGNB) released by German Sustainable Building Council; and the Green Building Tool (GBTool) e developed by an international organization named Green Building Challenge (GBC), led by Canada with the other multinational nations (Dirlich, 2011). Table 1 shows, that the index content of each currently existing evaluation system seems to be very similar, but their focus areas are different. Such as, the “design innovation” only appears in the LEED system and GSC system in order to highlight the necessity of building design and innovation. The DGNB certification system has the view of the technical quality evaluation, but no single index
Table 1 Green building assessment system index comparative analysis. Index
LEED BREEAM GSC DGNB GBTool China GB
Energy Water Site Indoor air quality Materials Pollution/Waste Management Health Transportation Eco-system Service quality Innovation design Life cycle assessment(LCA) Social & economic
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ e e
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ e e e e
√ √ √ √ √ √ e e √ √ √ √ e e
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ e √ √ √ e e √
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ e √ √
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ e √ √ e e e e
89
evaluation on the innovation or design assessment. The GBTool and DGNB evaluation system take the social and economic function of construction projects in consideration, while the other evaluation systems don't reflect such criteria. The index of the GBTool system contains the most of the possible evaluation areas, while the contents of its index are not very detailed, similar to the BREEAM and the LEED system. Compared to other evaluation systems, the most outstanding characteristic of the DGNB system is, that it is not just a green building assessment system, but also covers the contents of the ecological protection and economic assessment, and puts forward the critical relationships between the social and cultural issues, the health and the sustainable development. China's green building evaluation system integrates the advantages of the international evaluation systems (Li et al., 2014), its index contents cover most of the areas of a green building, but it is more focused on the comprehensive performance assessment for public buildings in the project's operational management. China Real Estate Chamber of Commerce (CRCC) and Elite Real Estate Academy (EREA) (2010) jointly released the Green Residential Carbon Reduction Technology Assessment Framework of China in 2010. It offers a comprehensive elaboration for a low carbon building assessment index and its calculation method, but indicates a lack of assessment criteria on the social and economic factors. Some researchers in China contribute by their opinion regarding to the assessment management of green buildings and sustainable projects. Shi (2007) pointed out, that the assessment of a green building needs to consider at least three aspects: 1) the project's green performance, 2) life cycle, and 3) professional systemic approach. Lent et al. (2008) thought, that the health and pollution, environmental resources and community management of the building products are the most important three indicators for the sustainability evaluation. While Jia et al. (2010) conducted another three assessment aspects for construction projects, namely the social, economic and environmental aspects. Zhang et al. (2011) claimed, that the effective utilization of the energy and renewable energy, low carbon behavior, resource utilization, transportation, operation management, and soft technology are critical criteria for the project LCT performance assessment. Chen et al. (2011) presented a low-carbon building evaluation framework, from the LCA perspective, supported by integrated carbon intensity databases, based on multi-scale inputeoutput analysis, then pointed that, the essential of the evaluation should consider the process of low-carbon planning, procurement and supply chain design, as well as the logistics management across the whole project life cycle. Huang et al. (2012) conducted a multi-attributive assessment with the modified indicators for the priority order of the assessed technologies in China under the sustainability criterion. They found, that the designed evaluation method can be used in regional cases if data resources are available; and for other sectors after indicator modification. In a word, the above assessment systems still leave some deficits for discussion: (1) the existing assessment systems are focused on evaluating the performance of construction products. Most of the contents just cover the aspects of energy saving and healthy indoor climate, but ignore the carbon emissions evaluation of buildings. (2)The weight of the index in each of the investigated assessment systems has a big difference in practice. (3)For the innovation assessment in the management and design process, there is still some controversy among the researchers in the discussion, whether it needs to be taken into consideration or not. Until now, only LEED and the Green Star system created an independent index to evaluate the “technological innovation” of the construction projects. (4)There are still some insufficient assessment factors e social, economy and comprehensive management ability evaluation, but ignore the project innovation integration management. (5) The
90
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
low carbon construction project and its “soft technology” assessment is a useful supplement to the existing evaluation system, but indicates a lack of a full consideration of the projects' systemic approach, complexity and integration. This type of factors cannot be ignored at the low carbon building projects and their technical innovation management. Herein, the assessment of LCT innovation in the construction industry is not meant to serve for the building product itself, but also involves the evaluation of comprehensiveness, integration and systemic approach on low carbon performance. Its content covers the evaluation of the social, economic, environmental and technical aspects. “Low carbon building requires not only a kind of calculation method, it also needs a more standardized evaluation system” (Long et al., 2008). Before the standard problem got solved, people still need to have more positively finished research projects on low carbon buildings (Wang et al., 2011). The LCT assessment, as one of the effective solutions of decarbonization implementation among the construction industry, needs to have more supplement or innovation to match the basis of the existing green building assessment systems. The low carbon evaluation in a particular engineering project needs a systemic and comprehensive evaluation to reflect well the decarbonization performance of building industries. This is the main research purpose of this article - to explore the LCT integration innovation management performance of the construction industry. 3. Framework of LCT integration innovation system management assessment From above exploration and literature analysis on sustainable construction project evaluation systems, the authors conclude that the contents of low carbon construction project evaluation cover a wide range of aspects in every construction project. Therefore, for the LCT management and carbon emission control involve the whole life cycle integrated management and system control. It requires the different participants' overall coordination in LCT activity to overcome the conflict and contradiction within the system. 3.1. Integration analysis of LCT innovation management The LCT integration management has features of comprehensiveness, complexity, collaboration and innovativeness. The management process is a dual management model of combining the view of process and technology, namely the integrated management itself is a kind of technology as well; the related evaluation of low carbon technology integration innovation is a systematic, integrated comprehensive evaluation. In 1969, the American scholar Hall put forward his “three dimensional structure system” for systems engineering management. This system consists of temporal dimension, logic dimension and knowledge dimension to form a three dimensional space structure. It is a system thinking method, which offers a support in solving the organization and management problems for the big and complex engineering projects with a large scale, complex structure and multi-dimensional factors involved. This three dimensional structure system of systems engineering is created in terms of assessing a project's LCA, trying to solve the complex systemic problems of integrated management (Gu et al., 2007). Ding (2002) pointed out, the construction project integrated management should consider three aspects of integration: the longitudinal integration management e based on whole life cycle, the horizontal management integration e based on the cost management of all elements, and the management environment integration e based on the comprehensive integrated perspective. Based on the
above exploration and the characteristics analysis of a particular construction engineering project, the authors found, that the low carbon technology integration innovation management evaluation in the construction industry also follows a process of system input, output control and integrated management. Its system performance evaluation is more focused on the whole process system evaluation, including the system's information, resources, technology, capital input, participants' behavior in project innovation activities, the comprehensive innovation output performance and management control (Fig. 1), while not just the final output review. Herein, Y SðX; MÞ represents the function of the system output. In order to achieve the satisfactory results of the output in case it has the interference to the system, it can be implemented by changing the input variable, while the change of the input variables requires a certain interference and process control. Within the whole life cycle of projects, it requires any participants engaged in the project's LCT activity to have the target control/management around the LCT requirements. Although sometimes the project runtime is not consistent, or the management content and method are different, every of them can be classified into the management and control of cost, schedule, quality, technology, resources, and risk factors. Hereby, the low carbon performance goal achievement of building industries also follows a system integration optimization process. The system synergy degree of each LCT innovation stakeholders interacts with the process of engineering project management, the communication fusion among the participants and the conflict solution between the individuals, such as conflict of technology integration, the role or interest conflict among the LCT integration innovation participants, etc. This forms a comprehensive integrated innovation system with multiple participants' parallel and multi-objectives involvement. The implementation of low carbon buildings bases on the integrated performance output of technology integration, target integration, process management and policies concept. According to the viewpoint of system input, process control and the system output, the system management evaluation of low carbon technology integration innovation in the construction industry should focus on the comprehensive assessment of three aspects: the input security system of low carbon construction technology integration innovation, the integrated management control system with the base of whole life cycle and the output system of low carbon performance. Herein, the security system of low carbon technology integration innovation includes the resource guarantee, system guarantee and technical support. The management control system mainly includes the management control and process control during the construction's entire life cycle. While the output system mainly includes the evaluation of low carbon performance, economic benefit and social benefit (Fig. 2).
Management, Control
M
Behaviour: Performance, CO2 Control, Innovation Benefit
Input: Information, Resource, Tech., Captal Input : X
S:System
Fig. 1. System input and output model framework.
Output : Y
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
3.2. LCT integration innovation assessment index selection The low carbon buildings require, the energy consumption and resource usage to be lower than those in the common construction, in order to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) impact on the atmosphere and the surrounding environment. For many project participants there is the question, what type of factors will influence the project low carbon technology innovation performance and how these factors affect the operation of the particular low carbon technology innovation system? What indicators or methods should be adopted to measure the technologic innovation integration's systemic performance? There is currently no appropriate theory or framework to provide a good answer in the construction industry. Robert et al. (2003) argued, that the project evaluation index selection should be able to well reflect the comprehensive target achievement of a project at all levels, instead of just focus on the monetary benefit evaluation. Therefore, the selection of evaluation indexes should follow the principle of goal consistency, scientific integrity, operability, comparability and gradation, etc. First of all, this paper employs the method of literature analysis and practical interviews, in order to explore the existing research status of green building assessment systems and evaluation index schemes for low carbon technology research, and proposes a preliminary standardized evaluation index. Here, considering the characteristics of construction industry, the authors add the index contents of low carbon technology integration innovation efficiency, economy and management, which are different from the traditional low carbon construction project evaluation index schemes. Secondly, the authors select 31 indicators, involved into the evaluation of low carbon technology in building industries, according to the system management concept and the framework shows above. Then they divide those indicators into three categories: series A represents the security system of low carbon technology integration innovation system management in construction projects, series B represents the process management control system, series C represents the comprehensive performance evaluation system of the system output. The related indicators are shown in Table 2. Thirdly, the authors conducted the five Likert scale design principles to form the design questionnaires and released 120 questionnaires. 91 valid questionnaires got back finally. According
LC Performance
LCT Innovation Mgt Performance System
Output
Economic Benefit Social Benefit
Control
Tech. Integration
LCT Innoation. Supporting System
LCT Innovation Mgt Control System
In
Regulation
Mgt Control
pu t
Resources
Process Control
91
to the above questionnaires results, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) method was adopted, in order to stepwise refine the assessment index. Considering the index scientific value and completion, the authors' team interviewed 10 experts to re-confirm the indexes selection (three exports are interviewed on the telephone). Based on the export score, the index is being rated again, based on the weights priority and low weight indexes are being eliminated, in order to determine the key indicators list compared to the results from exploratory factor analysis. And finally, the authors had a team discussion together with the team and confirmed the index selection list as the main content of low carbon technology integrated innovation system management evaluation for building industries. For the indicators, selected from the second round review, the authors had a team discussion and interviewed some representatives from the typical construction enterprises,1 and found that: the contents of indicator A5 and B1 are too general to precise, they cannot be quantitated. Moreover, from the questionnaire feedback, the importance rate given for these two indicators is lower, compared to the other indicators. The authors decided to excerpt the two indicators. The content of indicator B6 is similar with indicator A3, A3 was kept. Indicator B12 is preserved as well, because the low carbon construction equipment and workmanship process are one of the effective technology methods, how to reduce CO2 emissions besides the low carbon technology itself. Then the authors' team come up with the final indicators list shown in Table 3. Finally, according to the concept of integrated management, the authors classify the selected indictors into three parts of input subsystem, system control and system output: the LCT integration innovation assurance system, LCT integration control system and LCT integration performance evaluation system. Then the authors recode the selected indicators as a final evaluation system, which is including three first level indicators, 7 level indicators and eighteen third level indicators (Table 4). 4. LCT integration innovation system management evaluation weight determination There are many evaluation methods for the performance review of construction projects. Whether the evaluation result is reasonable or not, depends on the balance of weight of each index. The traditional analytic hierarchy process (AHP) or fuzzy hierarchy evaluation method are popular in practice to determine the weights of low carbon sustainable projects. The results from these two evaluation methods are greatly influenced by subjective factors, because the index weight is determined by some certain expert or an experts team. This method is simple and intuitive, but embodies a certain subjectivity, which is not scientific enough for the objective evaluation. Implementing the rough set evaluation method, and avoid such shortcoming, due to the evaluation result are based on the experimental data with the data mining technology, to find out the inherent dependence between the datasets. It is more objective than a fuzzy hierarchy estimation and can reflect the authenticity of the evaluation results. 4.1. Rough theory Rough set theory is proposed by a mathematician from Poland named Professor Pawlak (1994). He put forward a theory of data
Tech. Support
Fig. 2. Three-dimensional assessment of LCT integration innovation framework with project life cycle ebase.
1 The interviewers are professionals from Yangpu District Construction Administration of Shanghai and the green certification consulting project managers - from Green Energy Technology (Shanghai) co., LTD.
92
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
Table 2 Initial indicators of LCT integration innovation management assessment. Code
Description
Source
Code
Description
Source
A1
Management regulation
Jia et al. (2010)
B9
Participant conflict management capability
A2 A3
Self-creation USGBC (2009)
B10 B11
Financial support Low carbon material
A4 A5 A6 A7
Portion of LCT engineers Assessment of low carbon standard is reasonable or not LCT innovation investment rate Policy supporting Participants LCT development capability Operation cost
Magrath and Hardy (1989); Guo (2004) Du and Wang (2011) MOC (2006); USGBC (2009)
B12 C1 C2 C3
Low carbon processing technology Carbon emissions of unit building area Carbon sink per capita Carbon sink of unit building area
MOC (2006); USGBC (2009) CRECC and EREA (2010) Self-creation CRECC and EREA (2010)
A8 B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6
Participants contract execution rate Design innovation Low Carbon Equipment No “Three R” in operation Recycling rate of Waste materials LCT integration innovation input intensity Construction design and method evaluation
C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10
Energy saving rate Carbon emissions of unit volume Is it equipped with circulation storage? Yields of LCT integration Rate of return of LCT innovation Patents of LCT Rate of LCT adoption
CRECC and EREA (2010) CRECC and EREA (2010) USGBC (2009) Jia et al. (2010) Self-creation Self-creation Self-creation
B7 B8
Energy consumption per unit output value Participants' coordination degree
Jia et al. (2010) Du and Wang (2011) Self-creation CRECC and EREA (2010) Liu (2008) USGBC (2009) USGBC (2009) USGBC (2009) USGBC (2009) Self-creation MOC (2006); USGBC (2009) USGBC (2009) Liu (2008)
C11
Social benefit evaluation of LCT innovation
Jia et al. (2010)
Table 3 LCT integrated innovation evaluation selected indicators list. Item
Code
Description
1 2
A2 A3
3 4 5 6
A4 A7 A8 B5
Portion of LCT engineers Is the assessment of low carbon standard reasonable or not Rate of LCT innovation investment Operation cost Rate of Contract execution LCT integration innovation input intensity
Item
Code
Description
Item
Code
Description
7 8
B7 B8
Energy consumption per unit GDP value Participants' coordination degree
13 14
C3 C4
Carbon sink of unit building area Energy saving rate
9 10 11 12
B9 B11 B12 C1
Participant conflict management Capability Low carbon material Low carbon processing technology carbon emissions of unit building area
15 16 17 18
C7 C8 C10 C11
Yields of LCT integration Rate of return of LCT innovation Rate of LCT adoption Social benefit evaluation of LCT innovation
Table 4 LCT integration innovation evaluation system in the building industries.
LCT integration innovation evaluation system for building industry
1st level indicators
2nd level indicators
3rd level indicators
LCT integration innovation assurance system (X1)
Resource input (Y11)
Rate of LCT innovation investment (Z11) Portion of LCT Engineers (Z12) Is the assessment of low carbon standard reasonable or not (Z13) Operation cost (Z14) Rate of LCT adoption (Z15) LCT integration innovation input intensity (Z21) Low carbon material (Z22) Low carbon processing technology (Z23) Energy consumption per unit GDP value (Z24) Participants' coordination degree (Z25) Participant conflict management Capability (Z26) Rate of Contract execution (Z27) carbon emissions of unit building area (Z31) Energy saving rate (Z32) carbon sink of unit building area (Z33) Yields of LCT integration (Z34) Rate of carbon return of LCT integration (Z35) Social benefit evaluation of LCT integration (Z36)
Regulations input (Y12)
LCT integration control system (X2)
Technology input (Y13) System integration process control (Y21)
System integration management control (Y22) LCT integration performance evaluation system (X3)
Low carbon performance (Y31)
LCT innovation efficiency (Y32)
analysis and the most significant characteristics of this method is that the researchers do not need to provide any prior knowledge of data collection to solve the problems, but only classify the measured data itself to discover the implicit knowledge and reveal the internal law of the potential data. Rough set theory could deal with incomplete data and simplify the raw data sets, but retains the key data information under the premise of the data reduction to get the minimum expression of knowledge. Meanwhile, it can assess the dependent relationships among the selected data and obtained
the classification rules from the empirical data which is easy to be verified, this is good for the intelligent control (Aydogan, 2011; Zeng, 1996). Assuming the knowledge sets can be expressed with a four group dataset K ¼ ðU; R; V; f Þ, U is the set consisting of whole domain, U ¼ fX1 ; X2 ; ∧; Xm g, R is attribute characteristic variables set, for each subset X2U and an equivalence relation function R ¼ indðKÞ, it can divide collection X according to the basic set of R. V is the collection of attribute values. In order to measure
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
fdesðYiÞ; Yi2Rg and show exactly the relationship degree of the objects in subset X, below definition are provided:
Definition 1: R ðXÞ ¼ UfY2U=R : Y < Xg
(1)
R ðXÞ ¼ UfY2U=R : Y∩ Xs∅g
(2)
Here function (1) and (2) are called as the lower approximation and upper approximation of R respectively, and call posr ðXÞ ¼ R ðXÞ as the domain R of X, for the collection in knowledge R, all the data in collection U can go into collection X. Definition 2. Say K ¼ ðU; RÞ as knowledge base, and P; Q 4R. When k ¼ rp ðQ Þ ¼ cardðposp ðQ ÞÞ=cardðUÞ, it can be guided at K degree, rp ðQ Þ could be regard as the dependence degree between Q and P. Definition 3. The knowledge system can be expressed as S U; C; D, herein, U is a collection of objects, C∪D ¼ R is the collection of attribute variable and the sub-set C and D are defined as conditions attribute and results attribute, V ¼ Ua2A Va is the collection of the attribute value, Va is a range of attribute a2R, f : U R > V is an information function, it defines the attribute value of objective collection X in U. The knowledge expression system can be expressed with a tabular form, herein the columns represent properties, and the line represents the evaluating object. The data table is called “knowledge representation system” (KRS). In order to find out the importance of an attribute or attribute set, the other attributes should be excerpted first and examined how the classified knowledge system changes without those attributes. If the classification of knowledge system will be corresponding change once remove this attribute, it shows the attribute is strong, namely the attribute has high importance, otherwise this attribute intensity is small, and its importance is low as well. 0 The importance of the classification of the attribute subset B 4B can be exported from set C, the authors take the difference degree of independence between those two sub-set value, namely, RB ðCÞ ðCÞ to define the weight of each indicator per below steps: RBB0 (1) Create the index knowledge representation system (KRS) against the father index layer starting from the lowest layer of system, each sub-index forms the conditional attribute set C, the father index namely is the decisional attribute set D, assume C ¼ fa1 ; a2 ; ::ai :::an g. (2) Quantize the knowledge representation system (KRS) and delete duplicate rows. (3) Calculate the conditional attributes value poscai ðDÞ. (4) Calculate the importance of each conditional attribute Pi ¼ rc ðDÞ rcai ðDÞ or use equation (3) to calculate the importance.
mR ¼
jPosP ðQ Þj PosPjRj ðQ Þ jUj
Wi ¼
m X j¼i
aj bij
Herein ai represents the weight of first level indexes to the evaluation target, bij represents the weight of the second level index to the first level indexes. After de related assumption, it requires the determination of the membership degree for each index. Firstly, the authors analyze the characteristics of each indicator to determine its membership function. Then, they substitute the parameter value Xi of each evaluating indicator and their corresponding standard values into its membership function respectively to calculate the membership degree mAðXi Þ. And finally, use the linear weighting method to have a comprehensive evaluation of each indicator equation (5).
P¼
n X
(5)
Based on the comparative results of evaluated objects and the reference objects namely P1 and P2 , the project system management performance degree of low carbon technology integration innovation can be determined.
4.2. Index weight within a case study In order to verify the feasibility and rationality of above indexes, the authors explored 15 construction projects, provided by Shanghai Construction Administration in Yangpu District and Green Energy Technology (Shanghai) Co., LTD., the specific explored data is as follows: all the quantitative indexes originate directly from the original data, the data of qualitative indicators is rated by project team experts from each project and discretized to prevent the data nonuniformity. For the purpose to get more scientific evaluation of LCT integration innovation management performance, five experts were invited to have a score review meeting according to the actual situation of construction project in accordance with the grade index system. Because of the diversity and limitation of the indexes, in practice, the authors simplified the index system and segment the tertiary indexes under the secondary indexes, namely, the system with three aspects were divided according to the safeguard system for LCT integration innovation, the control system of LCT integration innovation management and the management performance evaluation system of LCT integration innovation. The weight of each component index weight were verified, then the calculations for the secondary and primary indexes were ratcheted up accordingly.
Table 5 Assurance system performance assessment scoreboard of LCT innovation.
(3)
(4)
Wi mAðXi Þ
i¼1
Domain
P (5) Normalization: Put PA ¼ ni¼1 Pi , then make out Wi0 ¼ Pi =PA namely as the weight of sub-index ai to the father index. Once the weight of each index has been given by using the above method, it is used to calculate each index respectively of the higher level index. Starting at the next higher level, the comprehensive weight of various indicators from top to bottom could be calculated out per following equation (4):
93
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10 C11 C12 C13 C14 C15
LCT integration innovation assurance system
Exports rating
Z11
Z12
Z13
Z14
Z15
E1
E2
E3
E4
E5
F
2.1% 1.5% 2.0% 0 2.1% 3.1% 1.9% 1.8% 1.3% 2.0% 2.5% 0.8% 1.2% 2.3% 1.8%
45% 29% 71% 35% 60% 35% 25% 71% 50% 45% 48% 10% 75% 100% 23%
1 1 1 2 3 1 1 2 1 3 3 2 2 3 3
1.4 1.21 1.38 1.41 1.72 1.4 1.45 1.40 1.39 1.63 1.3 1.15 1.3 1.65 1.81
1 1 1 1 1 2 3 1 1 3 2 3 2 3 2
85 76 78 74 70 77 82 81 78 80 89 90 84 86 90
76 84 86 82 79 82 79 68 83 92 70 82 86 81 91
83 85 83 80 72 75 75 75 88 88 85 89 89 89 94
75 88 91 83 78 83 92 82 87 85 83 85 92 79 86
82 90 87 88 83 87 90 84 92 79 86 79 95 83 87
241 257 256 245 229 242 251 238 258 253 254 256 271 250 268
94
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
Table 5 is the analysis of the weights determination for the security system. The value in left side of Table 5 is the actual rate of 15 projects, herein, the values of two qualitative indicators (Z13 and Z15) are given by the experts according to the project status with the scale 1, 2 and 3. The right side of Table 5 is the knowledge representation system (KRS), rated by five experts for each project. The authors' team removed the highest and the lowest points to prevent the prejudice and used the total score as a decision attributed F. Then they have a discretization on the data in Table 6, and got a simplified knowledge representation system (KRS) shown in Table 6. Herein: Rate of LCT innovation investment (Z11):1-0e1.0%; 2-1.1%e2.1%; 3-2.2%e3.1%. Portion of LCT engineers (Z12):1-10%e40%; 2-41%e70%; 3-71%e 100%. Is the assessment of low carbon standard reasonable or not (Z13):1-OK; 2-good; 3-excellentOperation cost (Z14):1-1.21e1.40; 21.41e1.61; 3-1.61e1.81. Rate of LCT adoption (Z15):1-OK; 2-Good;-Excellent. F:1-229e242; 2-243e256; 3-257e271. Per Table 6, the authors get below knowledge expression:
U=IndðZ1215 Þ ¼ fðC1; C9Þ; ðC2Þ; ðC3Þ; ðC4Þ; ðC5Þ; ðC6Þ; ðC8Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC13Þ; ð14Þg (6) U=IndðZ11 ; Z1315 Þ ¼ fðC1; C2; C9Þ; ðC3:C8Þ; ðC4Þ; ðC5Þ; ðC6Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC13Þ; ðC14Þg (7) U=IndðZ11 ; Z12 ; Z14 ; Z15 Þ ¼ fðC1; C9Þ; ðC2Þ; ðC3; C8Þ; ðC4Þ; ðC5Þ;
posðZ1215 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC2; C3; C4; C5; C6; C8; C13; C11; C14g ¼ 9
(13)
posðZ11 ;Z1315 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC4; C5; C6; C11; C13; C14g ¼ 6
(14)
posðZ11 ;Z12 ;Z14 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC2; C4; C5; C6; C11; C13; C14g ¼ 7
(15)
posðZ1113 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC3; C6; C11; C14g ¼ 4
(16)
posðZ1114 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC2; C4; C5; C6; C11; C14g ¼ 6
(17)
posCðFÞ¼fC1;C2;C3;C4;C5;C6;C8;C9;C11;C13;C14g¼11
(18)
Herein, below data are given accordingly:
rcðdÞ ¼ 11=11 ¼ 1;
(19)
rcðZ1215 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 9=11 ¼ 0:82;
(20)
rcðZ11 ;Z1315 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 6=11 ¼ 0:55;
(21)
rcðZ11 ;Z12 ;Z14 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 7=11 ¼ 0:64;
(22)
rcðZ1113 ; Z15 ÞðFÞ ¼ 4=11 ¼ 0:36;
(23)
rcðZ1114 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 6=11 ¼ 0:55
(24)
Furthermore, the importance of each conditional attribute can be calculated as below:
rcðdÞ rcðZ1215 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 1 0:82 ¼ 0:18;
(25)
rcðdÞ rcðZ11 ;Z1315 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 1 0:55 ¼ 0:45;
(26)
rcðdÞ rcðZ11 ;Z12 ;Z14 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 1 0:64 ¼ 0:36;
(27)
rcðdÞ rcðZ1113 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 1 0:36 ¼ 0:64;
(28)
rcðdÞ rcðZ1114 Þ ¼ 1 0:55 ¼ 0:45
(29)
ðC6Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC13Þ; ðC14Þg (8) U=IndðZ1113 ; Z15 Þ ¼ fðC1; C5; C9Þ; ðC2; C4Þ; ðC3Þ; ðC6Þ; ðC8; 13Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC14Þg (9) U=IndðZ1114 Þ ¼ fðC1; C9Þ; ðC2Þ; ðC3; C8; C13Þ; ðC4Þ; ðC5Þ; ðC6Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC14Þg (10) U=f ¼ fðC1; C5; C6; C8Þ; ðC2; C9; C13; Þ; ðC3; C4; C11; C14Þg
(11)
U=C ¼ fC1; C2; C3; C4; C5; C6; C8; C9; C11; C13; C14g
(12)
then: Table 6 Simplified knowledge representation system (KRS) of LCT integration. Domain
Z11
Z12
Z13
Z14
Z15
F
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C8 C9 C11 C13 C14
2 2 2 2 2 3 2 2 3 2 3
2 1 3 1 2 1 3 2 2 3 3
1 1 2 1 1 1 2 1 3 2 3
1 1 1 2 3 1 1 1 1 1 3
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 3
1 3 2 2 1 1 1 3 2 3 2
After the discretization, the weight of each attribute variables can be calculated out as following: Z11 ¼ 0.09; Z12 ¼ 0.22; Z13 ¼ 0.17; Z14 ¼ 0.31; Z15 ¼ 0.21. The authors calculated respectively the weight of LCT integration control system and performance evaluation system in the same way, as shown in Table 7. Based on the above weight verification results, a system performance assessment of LCT innovation for the projects in the construction industry could be formed clearly. Taking the first four typical investigated construction projects above as example (see note)2 to evaluate their performance of LCT integration innovation,
2 Note: Two of the four cases are provided by Yangpu District Construction Management agency in Shanghai city: C1 is a green residential resettlement supporting commercial project (phase I) in Yangpu district; C2 is an ordinary residential resettlement supporting commercial project in Yangpu district; Another two projects are green projects provided by a LEED certification company. respectively C3 is Suzhou lab building (LEED) certification program of UL -CCIC company; C4 is a medical equipment company (Suzhou) office (LEED certificated program).Because the project data has some business confidential concern, the authors' team didn't have further open discussion here, due to the evaluation result they got, shall not affect the conclusions of this study.
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
95
Table 7 Weight of LCT integration innovation evaluation system. 1st level indicators
Weight
2nd level indicators
Weight
3rd level indicators
Weight
LCT integration innovation assurance system (X1)
0.44
Resource input (Y11)
0.11
Regulations input (Y12)
0.07
0.09 0.22 0.17
Technology input (Y13) System integration process control (Y21)
0.19 0.08
System integration management control (Y22)
0.16
Low carbon performance (Y31)
0.15
LCT innovation efficiency (Y32)
0.24
Rate of LCT innovation investment (Z11) Portion of LCT Engineers (Z12) Is the assessment of low carbon standard easonable or not (Z13) Operation cost (Z14) Rate of LCT adoption (Z15) LCT integration innovation input intensity (Z21) Low carbon material (Z22) Low carbon processing technology (Z23) Energy consumption per unit GDP value (Z24) Participants' coordination degree (Z25) Participant conflict management Capability (Z26) Rate of Contract execution (Z27) Carbon emissions of unit building area (Z31) Energy saving rate (Z32) Carbon sink of unit building area (Z33) Yields of LCT integration (Z34) Rate of carbon return of LCT integration (Z35) Social benefit evaluation of LCT integration (Z36)
LCT integration control system (X2)
LCT integration performance evaluation system (X3)
0.34
0.22
the quantitative data is directly obtained from the projects original raw data, some individual qualitative index data are rated by the five experts according to the project actual situation with anonymous grade of comprehensive evaluation. Based on the assessment calculation result, the low carbon technology integration innovation management system performance ranking in priority is C1 > C3 > C4 > C2. From the above weight analysis results of the rough set evaluation and the comparison analysis among the projects, the authors found that the weight ratio of LCT integration innovation evaluation in the three stages of “investment guarantee system, control system and integrated performance management system” is different. In the first phase of “investment guarantee system”, the weight is 0.44, while the second phase, namely, the “control system”, the weight value is 0.34, and the weight in the third phase, the “LCT integration performance evaluation system” phase is 0.22, which shows a steady trend from high to low. This indicates, that the enterprise managers generally paid great attention on the upfront assurance investment and management control in the middle stage for the low carbon technology integration innovation, but put relatively small attention on the low carbon performance and the benefit of low carbon technology integration innovation. In addition, this assessment system can better reflect the overall status in the implementation process of low carbon technology innovation for construction projects. In the above given project, project C1 is the green building, projects C3 and C4 are LEED certificated projects, project C2 is just an ordinary construction project and is not required to have any low carbon or green building certification. The evaluation results match with the actual operation outcomes or project certificates. 5. Conclusion and the way forward The haze weather is getting serious in China right now. How to control the CO2 emissions in construction is becoming an increasingly big issue. Therefore, the promotion of low carbon development model and increasing the investment in low carbon technology innovations, to realize low carbon economy transformation, becomes critically urgent. Based on the evaluation of the international green construction project status and the review of the existing literature, regarding the assessment studies, the process, described in the article, proposes an integrated low carbon technology innovation management system (evaluation framework) from the perspective of
0.31 0.21 0.15 0.12 0.09 0.11 0.15 0.21 0.17 0.15 0.30 0.30 0.05 0.15 0.05
system management. This evaluation system has been divided into three sections: an assurance system, control system and comprehensive performance evaluation system for the LCT integration innovation. It employs the combined methods of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and expert interviews to confirm the indexes of the evaluation system, then discusses the index weight of LCT integration innovation evaluation system with the rough set evaluation method, based on the practical projects in building industry. It is found that: (1) The index weight in the first two sections, namely “protection system and control system”, is higher than this one at the last section of the LCT integration innovation in the construction industry. It reflects, that the enterprise managers normally pay attention to the upfront affordable investment and the middle management control, instead of the low carbon benefits performance evaluation of low carbon technology integration innovation. It is a typical process management approach, but not a result review/management tool. (2) The evaluation system of low carbon technology integration innovation, framed from the perspective of system management, can well reflect the integrity, multi-stakeholderstructure and technology integration of LCT innovation integration. It reminds, the decision maker should take the complexity characteristics of the construction project into consideration, in developing the low carbon technology project evaluation criteria with multidimensional evaluation from the system perspective, instead of “cost” or “low carbon” only. (3) The index weights, proposed with the methods of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and rough set analysis, can well reflect the overall performance of the low carbon construction projects. The selection of indicators has some certain scientific value and effectiveness; its content evaluation will provide the related reference for the enterprise managers to improve the low carbon technology innovation management. Due to the complexity of engineering projects in construction industries, the above research results still leave some limitations, e.g.: when the authors list the low carbon index system of technology innovation in a building, because of the limitations of literature index and the sampling quantity limitation, there are many indicators influencing the performance of carbon emission dynamics
96
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
and LCT innovation. It is hard to cover all the aspects and could omit some other indicators less careful. In addition, this framework evaluation system tried its best, in order to adopt the quantitative index and the objective indexes, due to the dynamic and systemic character of the management process itself. Some individual indicators still cannot avoid the pitfalls of qualitative assessment. Herein, the authors will keep on the exploration with traceability research, and will focus on the research of more construction project evaluation and system evaluation, on tracking the latest status of green buildings, low carbon buildings, ecological buildings and sustainable building as well as the management of low carbon technology innovation. Later on, the authors are also going to focus on research activities on behavior model among the various participants, increasing the performance of low carbon innovation integration. The authors will pay attention to the following currently crucial research domains: social technical innovation, concept innovation and energy innovation systems, as well as the evaluation methods and application of interdisciplinary research on the assistance of low carbon technology innovation management. The essence of the development of low carbon economy in the construction industries could be found in the systemic innovation and technological innovation. LCT innovation should excerpt the limitations from the traditional deadlock of technicism and calls for a new management model and evaluation system to enhance the performance of LCT innovation. This article discussed the low carbon technology integration innovation management performance in construction industry, from the perspective of system management, based on the project LCA process. It is a new experiment on performance study of the LCT management for the construction industry, with a purpose to offer a reference for the practitioners, within the context of high public pressure of environmental protection and the problem of energy sources' shortage. It supports the low-carbon industry transformation, if the society adopts a new technology integration innovation management evaluation model. The achievement of this paper is a new attempt of management evaluation of low carbon technology innovation. It has currently a significant relevance in the macroscopic assessment field of energy shortage and environmental protection public pressure. Acknowledgments This research is supported by the Soft Science Research Project of Jiangxi Province in 2015 (No. 20151BBA0033), the Humanities and Social Science Research Project of Colleges and Universities in Jiangxi Province (No.JC1403), the National Social Science Foundation of China (No.11BJY143), and China Post-doctoral Science Foundation Founded Project (58th, No.2015M582393). References Aydogan, E.K., 2011. Performance measurement model for Turkish aviation firms using the rough-AHP and TOPSIS methods under fuzzy environment. Expert Syst. Appl. 38, 3992e3998.
BRE, 2011. Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method. British Academy of Building Research, England. http://www.breeam.org/ filelibrary/Technical%20Manuals/SD5073_BREEAM_2011_New_Construction_ Technical_Guide_ISSUE_2_0.pdf. accessed 24.02.14. Chen, G.Q., Chen, H., Chen, Z.M., Zhang, B., Shao, L., Guo, S., Zhou, S.Y., Jiang, M.M., 2011. Low-carbon building assessment and multi-scale inputeoutput analysis. Commun. Nonlinear Sci. Numer. Simul. 16, 583e595. China Real Estate Chamber of Commerce(CRECC), Elite (China) Real Estate Academy(EREA), 2010. China green residential carbon reduction technology assessment framework. Eco-city Green Build. 0, 30e33. Ding, S.Z., 2002. Organization Management Mod Exploration of Life-cycle Based Integrated Management on Nanjing Subway, 2002. Feb.22. Nanjing metro construction headquarters, Nanjing City China. Dirlich, S., 2011. A comparison of assessment and certification schemes for sustainable building and suggestions for an international standard system. IMRE J. 5, 1e12. Du, D., Wang, T., 2011. Study on the evaluation index system and development comprehensive evaluation of low carbon cities. Chin. J. Environ. Manag. 3, 8e11. Gu, J.F., Wang, H.C., Tang, X.J., et al., 2007. Meta-synthesis Methods System and Systematology Research. Science Press, Beijing China, p. 5. Guo, X.Y., 2004. A Theoretic Study of Marketing Channel Conflict-causes and Management. Harbin Engineering University, Heilongjiang City, China, pp. 1e63. Huang, B., Yang, H., Mauerhofer, V., Guo, R., 2012. Sustainability assessment of low carbon technologiesecase study of the building sector in China. J. Clean. Prod. 32, 244e250. Jia, H.J., Mi, S., Li, H.L., 2010. Research of performance evaluation of low-carbon economic policy in construction industry. Constr. Econ. 42e45. Lent, T., Walsh, B., Meadows, D., Bennett, A.K., Dean, S.W., 2008. Rethinking green building standards for comprehensive continuous improvement. J. Astm Int. 5, 101184e101193. Li, H., Chen, Y., Li, G., Song, G., 2014. Discussion on development of green industrial building evaluation system in China. Ind. Constr. 44, 54e56. Liu, L.B., 2008. Study on the Performance Evaluation of Construction Project Integrated Management. Hebei University of Engineering, Handan City, China. Long, W.D., Bai, W., Fan, L., 2008. Low carbon economy and development of building energy efficiency. Constr. Sci. Technol. 2, 16e20. Magrath, A.J., Hardy, K.G., 1989. A strategic paradigm for predicting manufacturerreseller conflict. Eur. J. Mark. 23, 94e108. Ministry of construction(MOC), 2006. Green building Evaluation Standard (GB/ T50378-2006). Building Industry Press, Beijing, China. Pawlak, Z., 1994. Slowinski R. Rough set approach to multi-attribute decision analysis, Invited Review. Eur. J. Operation Res. 72, 443e459. Robert, F.Cox, Issa, Raja R.A., Ahrens, Dar, 2003. Management's perception of key performance indicators for constructon. J. Constr. Eng. Manag. 129, 142e215. Shi, Q., 2007. Project life cycle based analysis of green building system. Proj. Manag. Tech. 3, 25e28. State Council, 2011. Guofa No.26. In: council, T.s. (Ed.), The Print and Distribute about “Twelfth Five-year” Energy Conservation and Emissions Reduction Comprehensive Work Plan from the State Council, pp. 1e6. Beijin. http://www. gov.cn/zwgk/2011-09/07/content_1941731.htm. accessed 26.12.13. USGBC, 2009. LEED-NC: Green Building Assessment System (V3.0). The United States green building council, Washington, pp. 1e89. Wang, J.P., Wang, C.Y., Yang, S.C., 2011. Evaluation system in the using stage of low carbon buildings. Build. Energy Effic. 39, 62e65. Xinhuanet, 2009. In: Xianzhi, L. (Ed.), China announces Targets on Carbon Dioxide Emission Cuts. xinhuanet, Beijin accessed 05.03.14. Yuan, B., Song, Y.h., Lin, B.R., Zhang, H., 2011. The Australian green building policies and regulations and evaluation system. Constr. Sci. Technol. 64e66. Zeng, H.L., 1996. Rough Set Theory and its Application. Chongqing University Press, Chongqing City, China. Zhang, X.Q., Zhu, Y.Z., Chen, H.X., et al., 2011. Interpretative structural modeling method(ISM) based analysis of low carbon building index system. Commer. Times 12, 120e121.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro
Low carbon technology integration innovation assessment index review based on rough set theory e an evidence from construction industry in China Xiaodong Lai a, b, *, Jixian Liu a, Georgi Georgiev c a b c
School of Economic and Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China School of Tourism and Urban Management, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, 330013, China Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP, Holzkirchen Branch, Fraunhoferstr. 10, 83626, Valley, Germany
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 10 February 2015 Received in revised form 7 March 2016 Accepted 7 March 2016 Available online 6 April 2016
An adequate response to global climate change and low carbon economy development has become a worldwide concerned subject. As one of the energetically most intensive industries, construction industry is a key area to promote decarbonization, which is an important path to realize national strategic goals on carbon reduction in China. This paper focuses on low carbon technology integration management, and analyzes the existing research status of green building or low carbon buildings on the related evaluation indexes, then proposes an evaluation system framework for the low carbon technology integration innovation from the perspective of the system management. It points out, that the evaluation of low carbon technology innovation should be conducted by a smarter managing of system resource input, the process control and the system comprehensive performance as an output. Furthermore, based on the questionnaire survey and the exploratory factor analysis result on the selected indexes, this paper implements a rough set method to identify the weight of all the indexes and found that:(1) managers focus more on the affordable input of the beginning stage and the management control in the middle period of the innovation, instead on the output performance in the later stage. This indicates, that the management control during the front stages is more essential than this during the later ones; (2) the constructed evaluation framework, from the system perspective, can properly reflect the integrity, multi-level stakeholder structure and technology integration in low carbon projects, which could support the decision-maker into considering the complexity of construction and evaluation of the technology innovation performance from multi-level perspective; (3) the combined methods, adopted with exploratory factor analysis and rough set evaluation to determine the evaluation index and its weights, could well reflect the overall performance of low carbon project evaluation, the selected indicators have certain scientific and practical effectiveness, which could provide references for enterprise on LCT innovation management. as an industry with a multi-level technologies integration, the single Technological adoption or innovation cannot satisfy the economic transformation requirements of the modern construction industry development. An integration innovation management evaluation model is needed for the sustainability evaluation in the construction practice. Its development is the main scientific objective of this study, by taking into consideration the entire life cycle assessment and various other factors. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Construction industry Low carbon technology Integration innovation Rough set System management Index review
1. Introduction
* Corresponding author. School of Economic and Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China. Tel.: þ86 20-39310072, þ86 13922909706 (mobile); fax: þ86 20-39310072; School of Turism and Urban Manageent, Jiangxi University of Finance and Econimic, Nanchang City, China, 330013; Tel: þ86-791 8388507 E-mail address: [email protected] (X. Lai). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.03.035 0959-6526/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
High investment, energy consumption and low added value characteristics of a particular construction project cause an increasing contradiction between the requirements of the society in the current energy crisis and those of the building industries. Currently, the construction energy consumption is responsible for about 1/3 of the total energy consumption in China. This proportion is increasing quickly with the rapid development of the
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
urbanization process (The State Council, 2011). According to the commitment by the Chinese Government to the United Nations, China needs to reduce the intensity of CO2 emissions proportional to the gross domestic production by 40e45% by 2020, compared with the 2005 levels, and released a new set of goals to reduce the number of production facilities with low energy efficiency in the power, coal, charcoal, steel, textile and petrochemical sectors in January 2010 (Xinhuanet, 2009). As a large energy consumption sector, the construction industries are facing great challenges now. Due to the complexity and long life cycles of engineering construction, in order to effectively control CO2 emissions and improve energy efficiency, it requires adopting the effective energy saving technology or low-carbon technologies. A complete set of system management and evaluation mechanisms is quite important here as well. Before the national low-carbon building evaluation system would be released officially, the implementation of low carbon projects or low carbon technology (LCT) innovation mainly relies on the Government's promotion and the enterprise's participation self-consciousness. While the non-standardized evaluation criteria for low carbon buildings are affecting the enthusiasm of enterprises, the continuously exploration on an LCT innovation management performance evaluation system for the construction industry in China becomes particularly necessary.
2. Literature review and analysis There are some different type of outstanding green building evaluation systems internationally, such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) developed by the US Green Building Council (USGBC, 2009); the British Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) published by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) in 1990 (BRE, 2011); the Green Star Certificate (GSC) rating system for buildings launched in 2003 by the Green Building Council of Australia (Yuan et al., 2011); the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen (DGNB) released by German Sustainable Building Council; and the Green Building Tool (GBTool) e developed by an international organization named Green Building Challenge (GBC), led by Canada with the other multinational nations (Dirlich, 2011). Table 1 shows, that the index content of each currently existing evaluation system seems to be very similar, but their focus areas are different. Such as, the “design innovation” only appears in the LEED system and GSC system in order to highlight the necessity of building design and innovation. The DGNB certification system has the view of the technical quality evaluation, but no single index
Table 1 Green building assessment system index comparative analysis. Index
LEED BREEAM GSC DGNB GBTool China GB
Energy Water Site Indoor air quality Materials Pollution/Waste Management Health Transportation Eco-system Service quality Innovation design Life cycle assessment(LCA) Social & economic
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ e e
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ e e e e
√ √ √ √ √ √ e e √ √ √ √ e e
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ e √ √ √ e e √
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ e √ √
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ e √ √ e e e e
89
evaluation on the innovation or design assessment. The GBTool and DGNB evaluation system take the social and economic function of construction projects in consideration, while the other evaluation systems don't reflect such criteria. The index of the GBTool system contains the most of the possible evaluation areas, while the contents of its index are not very detailed, similar to the BREEAM and the LEED system. Compared to other evaluation systems, the most outstanding characteristic of the DGNB system is, that it is not just a green building assessment system, but also covers the contents of the ecological protection and economic assessment, and puts forward the critical relationships between the social and cultural issues, the health and the sustainable development. China's green building evaluation system integrates the advantages of the international evaluation systems (Li et al., 2014), its index contents cover most of the areas of a green building, but it is more focused on the comprehensive performance assessment for public buildings in the project's operational management. China Real Estate Chamber of Commerce (CRCC) and Elite Real Estate Academy (EREA) (2010) jointly released the Green Residential Carbon Reduction Technology Assessment Framework of China in 2010. It offers a comprehensive elaboration for a low carbon building assessment index and its calculation method, but indicates a lack of assessment criteria on the social and economic factors. Some researchers in China contribute by their opinion regarding to the assessment management of green buildings and sustainable projects. Shi (2007) pointed out, that the assessment of a green building needs to consider at least three aspects: 1) the project's green performance, 2) life cycle, and 3) professional systemic approach. Lent et al. (2008) thought, that the health and pollution, environmental resources and community management of the building products are the most important three indicators for the sustainability evaluation. While Jia et al. (2010) conducted another three assessment aspects for construction projects, namely the social, economic and environmental aspects. Zhang et al. (2011) claimed, that the effective utilization of the energy and renewable energy, low carbon behavior, resource utilization, transportation, operation management, and soft technology are critical criteria for the project LCT performance assessment. Chen et al. (2011) presented a low-carbon building evaluation framework, from the LCA perspective, supported by integrated carbon intensity databases, based on multi-scale inputeoutput analysis, then pointed that, the essential of the evaluation should consider the process of low-carbon planning, procurement and supply chain design, as well as the logistics management across the whole project life cycle. Huang et al. (2012) conducted a multi-attributive assessment with the modified indicators for the priority order of the assessed technologies in China under the sustainability criterion. They found, that the designed evaluation method can be used in regional cases if data resources are available; and for other sectors after indicator modification. In a word, the above assessment systems still leave some deficits for discussion: (1) the existing assessment systems are focused on evaluating the performance of construction products. Most of the contents just cover the aspects of energy saving and healthy indoor climate, but ignore the carbon emissions evaluation of buildings. (2)The weight of the index in each of the investigated assessment systems has a big difference in practice. (3)For the innovation assessment in the management and design process, there is still some controversy among the researchers in the discussion, whether it needs to be taken into consideration or not. Until now, only LEED and the Green Star system created an independent index to evaluate the “technological innovation” of the construction projects. (4)There are still some insufficient assessment factors e social, economy and comprehensive management ability evaluation, but ignore the project innovation integration management. (5) The
90
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
low carbon construction project and its “soft technology” assessment is a useful supplement to the existing evaluation system, but indicates a lack of a full consideration of the projects' systemic approach, complexity and integration. This type of factors cannot be ignored at the low carbon building projects and their technical innovation management. Herein, the assessment of LCT innovation in the construction industry is not meant to serve for the building product itself, but also involves the evaluation of comprehensiveness, integration and systemic approach on low carbon performance. Its content covers the evaluation of the social, economic, environmental and technical aspects. “Low carbon building requires not only a kind of calculation method, it also needs a more standardized evaluation system” (Long et al., 2008). Before the standard problem got solved, people still need to have more positively finished research projects on low carbon buildings (Wang et al., 2011). The LCT assessment, as one of the effective solutions of decarbonization implementation among the construction industry, needs to have more supplement or innovation to match the basis of the existing green building assessment systems. The low carbon evaluation in a particular engineering project needs a systemic and comprehensive evaluation to reflect well the decarbonization performance of building industries. This is the main research purpose of this article - to explore the LCT integration innovation management performance of the construction industry. 3. Framework of LCT integration innovation system management assessment From above exploration and literature analysis on sustainable construction project evaluation systems, the authors conclude that the contents of low carbon construction project evaluation cover a wide range of aspects in every construction project. Therefore, for the LCT management and carbon emission control involve the whole life cycle integrated management and system control. It requires the different participants' overall coordination in LCT activity to overcome the conflict and contradiction within the system. 3.1. Integration analysis of LCT innovation management The LCT integration management has features of comprehensiveness, complexity, collaboration and innovativeness. The management process is a dual management model of combining the view of process and technology, namely the integrated management itself is a kind of technology as well; the related evaluation of low carbon technology integration innovation is a systematic, integrated comprehensive evaluation. In 1969, the American scholar Hall put forward his “three dimensional structure system” for systems engineering management. This system consists of temporal dimension, logic dimension and knowledge dimension to form a three dimensional space structure. It is a system thinking method, which offers a support in solving the organization and management problems for the big and complex engineering projects with a large scale, complex structure and multi-dimensional factors involved. This three dimensional structure system of systems engineering is created in terms of assessing a project's LCA, trying to solve the complex systemic problems of integrated management (Gu et al., 2007). Ding (2002) pointed out, the construction project integrated management should consider three aspects of integration: the longitudinal integration management e based on whole life cycle, the horizontal management integration e based on the cost management of all elements, and the management environment integration e based on the comprehensive integrated perspective. Based on the
above exploration and the characteristics analysis of a particular construction engineering project, the authors found, that the low carbon technology integration innovation management evaluation in the construction industry also follows a process of system input, output control and integrated management. Its system performance evaluation is more focused on the whole process system evaluation, including the system's information, resources, technology, capital input, participants' behavior in project innovation activities, the comprehensive innovation output performance and management control (Fig. 1), while not just the final output review. Herein, Y SðX; MÞ represents the function of the system output. In order to achieve the satisfactory results of the output in case it has the interference to the system, it can be implemented by changing the input variable, while the change of the input variables requires a certain interference and process control. Within the whole life cycle of projects, it requires any participants engaged in the project's LCT activity to have the target control/management around the LCT requirements. Although sometimes the project runtime is not consistent, or the management content and method are different, every of them can be classified into the management and control of cost, schedule, quality, technology, resources, and risk factors. Hereby, the low carbon performance goal achievement of building industries also follows a system integration optimization process. The system synergy degree of each LCT innovation stakeholders interacts with the process of engineering project management, the communication fusion among the participants and the conflict solution between the individuals, such as conflict of technology integration, the role or interest conflict among the LCT integration innovation participants, etc. This forms a comprehensive integrated innovation system with multiple participants' parallel and multi-objectives involvement. The implementation of low carbon buildings bases on the integrated performance output of technology integration, target integration, process management and policies concept. According to the viewpoint of system input, process control and the system output, the system management evaluation of low carbon technology integration innovation in the construction industry should focus on the comprehensive assessment of three aspects: the input security system of low carbon construction technology integration innovation, the integrated management control system with the base of whole life cycle and the output system of low carbon performance. Herein, the security system of low carbon technology integration innovation includes the resource guarantee, system guarantee and technical support. The management control system mainly includes the management control and process control during the construction's entire life cycle. While the output system mainly includes the evaluation of low carbon performance, economic benefit and social benefit (Fig. 2).
Management, Control
M
Behaviour: Performance, CO2 Control, Innovation Benefit
Input: Information, Resource, Tech., Captal Input : X
S:System
Fig. 1. System input and output model framework.
Output : Y
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
3.2. LCT integration innovation assessment index selection The low carbon buildings require, the energy consumption and resource usage to be lower than those in the common construction, in order to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) impact on the atmosphere and the surrounding environment. For many project participants there is the question, what type of factors will influence the project low carbon technology innovation performance and how these factors affect the operation of the particular low carbon technology innovation system? What indicators or methods should be adopted to measure the technologic innovation integration's systemic performance? There is currently no appropriate theory or framework to provide a good answer in the construction industry. Robert et al. (2003) argued, that the project evaluation index selection should be able to well reflect the comprehensive target achievement of a project at all levels, instead of just focus on the monetary benefit evaluation. Therefore, the selection of evaluation indexes should follow the principle of goal consistency, scientific integrity, operability, comparability and gradation, etc. First of all, this paper employs the method of literature analysis and practical interviews, in order to explore the existing research status of green building assessment systems and evaluation index schemes for low carbon technology research, and proposes a preliminary standardized evaluation index. Here, considering the characteristics of construction industry, the authors add the index contents of low carbon technology integration innovation efficiency, economy and management, which are different from the traditional low carbon construction project evaluation index schemes. Secondly, the authors select 31 indicators, involved into the evaluation of low carbon technology in building industries, according to the system management concept and the framework shows above. Then they divide those indicators into three categories: series A represents the security system of low carbon technology integration innovation system management in construction projects, series B represents the process management control system, series C represents the comprehensive performance evaluation system of the system output. The related indicators are shown in Table 2. Thirdly, the authors conducted the five Likert scale design principles to form the design questionnaires and released 120 questionnaires. 91 valid questionnaires got back finally. According
LC Performance
LCT Innovation Mgt Performance System
Output
Economic Benefit Social Benefit
Control
Tech. Integration
LCT Innoation. Supporting System
LCT Innovation Mgt Control System
In
Regulation
Mgt Control
pu t
Resources
Process Control
91
to the above questionnaires results, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) method was adopted, in order to stepwise refine the assessment index. Considering the index scientific value and completion, the authors' team interviewed 10 experts to re-confirm the indexes selection (three exports are interviewed on the telephone). Based on the export score, the index is being rated again, based on the weights priority and low weight indexes are being eliminated, in order to determine the key indicators list compared to the results from exploratory factor analysis. And finally, the authors had a team discussion together with the team and confirmed the index selection list as the main content of low carbon technology integrated innovation system management evaluation for building industries. For the indicators, selected from the second round review, the authors had a team discussion and interviewed some representatives from the typical construction enterprises,1 and found that: the contents of indicator A5 and B1 are too general to precise, they cannot be quantitated. Moreover, from the questionnaire feedback, the importance rate given for these two indicators is lower, compared to the other indicators. The authors decided to excerpt the two indicators. The content of indicator B6 is similar with indicator A3, A3 was kept. Indicator B12 is preserved as well, because the low carbon construction equipment and workmanship process are one of the effective technology methods, how to reduce CO2 emissions besides the low carbon technology itself. Then the authors' team come up with the final indicators list shown in Table 3. Finally, according to the concept of integrated management, the authors classify the selected indictors into three parts of input subsystem, system control and system output: the LCT integration innovation assurance system, LCT integration control system and LCT integration performance evaluation system. Then the authors recode the selected indicators as a final evaluation system, which is including three first level indicators, 7 level indicators and eighteen third level indicators (Table 4). 4. LCT integration innovation system management evaluation weight determination There are many evaluation methods for the performance review of construction projects. Whether the evaluation result is reasonable or not, depends on the balance of weight of each index. The traditional analytic hierarchy process (AHP) or fuzzy hierarchy evaluation method are popular in practice to determine the weights of low carbon sustainable projects. The results from these two evaluation methods are greatly influenced by subjective factors, because the index weight is determined by some certain expert or an experts team. This method is simple and intuitive, but embodies a certain subjectivity, which is not scientific enough for the objective evaluation. Implementing the rough set evaluation method, and avoid such shortcoming, due to the evaluation result are based on the experimental data with the data mining technology, to find out the inherent dependence between the datasets. It is more objective than a fuzzy hierarchy estimation and can reflect the authenticity of the evaluation results. 4.1. Rough theory Rough set theory is proposed by a mathematician from Poland named Professor Pawlak (1994). He put forward a theory of data
Tech. Support
Fig. 2. Three-dimensional assessment of LCT integration innovation framework with project life cycle ebase.
1 The interviewers are professionals from Yangpu District Construction Administration of Shanghai and the green certification consulting project managers - from Green Energy Technology (Shanghai) co., LTD.
92
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
Table 2 Initial indicators of LCT integration innovation management assessment. Code
Description
Source
Code
Description
Source
A1
Management regulation
Jia et al. (2010)
B9
Participant conflict management capability
A2 A3
Self-creation USGBC (2009)
B10 B11
Financial support Low carbon material
A4 A5 A6 A7
Portion of LCT engineers Assessment of low carbon standard is reasonable or not LCT innovation investment rate Policy supporting Participants LCT development capability Operation cost
Magrath and Hardy (1989); Guo (2004) Du and Wang (2011) MOC (2006); USGBC (2009)
B12 C1 C2 C3
Low carbon processing technology Carbon emissions of unit building area Carbon sink per capita Carbon sink of unit building area
MOC (2006); USGBC (2009) CRECC and EREA (2010) Self-creation CRECC and EREA (2010)
A8 B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6
Participants contract execution rate Design innovation Low Carbon Equipment No “Three R” in operation Recycling rate of Waste materials LCT integration innovation input intensity Construction design and method evaluation
C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10
Energy saving rate Carbon emissions of unit volume Is it equipped with circulation storage? Yields of LCT integration Rate of return of LCT innovation Patents of LCT Rate of LCT adoption
CRECC and EREA (2010) CRECC and EREA (2010) USGBC (2009) Jia et al. (2010) Self-creation Self-creation Self-creation
B7 B8
Energy consumption per unit output value Participants' coordination degree
Jia et al. (2010) Du and Wang (2011) Self-creation CRECC and EREA (2010) Liu (2008) USGBC (2009) USGBC (2009) USGBC (2009) USGBC (2009) Self-creation MOC (2006); USGBC (2009) USGBC (2009) Liu (2008)
C11
Social benefit evaluation of LCT innovation
Jia et al. (2010)
Table 3 LCT integrated innovation evaluation selected indicators list. Item
Code
Description
1 2
A2 A3
3 4 5 6
A4 A7 A8 B5
Portion of LCT engineers Is the assessment of low carbon standard reasonable or not Rate of LCT innovation investment Operation cost Rate of Contract execution LCT integration innovation input intensity
Item
Code
Description
Item
Code
Description
7 8
B7 B8
Energy consumption per unit GDP value Participants' coordination degree
13 14
C3 C4
Carbon sink of unit building area Energy saving rate
9 10 11 12
B9 B11 B12 C1
Participant conflict management Capability Low carbon material Low carbon processing technology carbon emissions of unit building area
15 16 17 18
C7 C8 C10 C11
Yields of LCT integration Rate of return of LCT innovation Rate of LCT adoption Social benefit evaluation of LCT innovation
Table 4 LCT integration innovation evaluation system in the building industries.
LCT integration innovation evaluation system for building industry
1st level indicators
2nd level indicators
3rd level indicators
LCT integration innovation assurance system (X1)
Resource input (Y11)
Rate of LCT innovation investment (Z11) Portion of LCT Engineers (Z12) Is the assessment of low carbon standard reasonable or not (Z13) Operation cost (Z14) Rate of LCT adoption (Z15) LCT integration innovation input intensity (Z21) Low carbon material (Z22) Low carbon processing technology (Z23) Energy consumption per unit GDP value (Z24) Participants' coordination degree (Z25) Participant conflict management Capability (Z26) Rate of Contract execution (Z27) carbon emissions of unit building area (Z31) Energy saving rate (Z32) carbon sink of unit building area (Z33) Yields of LCT integration (Z34) Rate of carbon return of LCT integration (Z35) Social benefit evaluation of LCT integration (Z36)
Regulations input (Y12)
LCT integration control system (X2)
Technology input (Y13) System integration process control (Y21)
System integration management control (Y22) LCT integration performance evaluation system (X3)
Low carbon performance (Y31)
LCT innovation efficiency (Y32)
analysis and the most significant characteristics of this method is that the researchers do not need to provide any prior knowledge of data collection to solve the problems, but only classify the measured data itself to discover the implicit knowledge and reveal the internal law of the potential data. Rough set theory could deal with incomplete data and simplify the raw data sets, but retains the key data information under the premise of the data reduction to get the minimum expression of knowledge. Meanwhile, it can assess the dependent relationships among the selected data and obtained
the classification rules from the empirical data which is easy to be verified, this is good for the intelligent control (Aydogan, 2011; Zeng, 1996). Assuming the knowledge sets can be expressed with a four group dataset K ¼ ðU; R; V; f Þ, U is the set consisting of whole domain, U ¼ fX1 ; X2 ; ∧; Xm g, R is attribute characteristic variables set, for each subset X2U and an equivalence relation function R ¼ indðKÞ, it can divide collection X according to the basic set of R. V is the collection of attribute values. In order to measure
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
fdesðYiÞ; Yi2Rg and show exactly the relationship degree of the objects in subset X, below definition are provided:
Definition 1: R ðXÞ ¼ UfY2U=R : Y < Xg
(1)
R ðXÞ ¼ UfY2U=R : Y∩ Xs∅g
(2)
Here function (1) and (2) are called as the lower approximation and upper approximation of R respectively, and call posr ðXÞ ¼ R ðXÞ as the domain R of X, for the collection in knowledge R, all the data in collection U can go into collection X. Definition 2. Say K ¼ ðU; RÞ as knowledge base, and P; Q 4R. When k ¼ rp ðQ Þ ¼ cardðposp ðQ ÞÞ=cardðUÞ, it can be guided at K degree, rp ðQ Þ could be regard as the dependence degree between Q and P. Definition 3. The knowledge system can be expressed as S U; C; D, herein, U is a collection of objects, C∪D ¼ R is the collection of attribute variable and the sub-set C and D are defined as conditions attribute and results attribute, V ¼ Ua2A Va is the collection of the attribute value, Va is a range of attribute a2R, f : U R > V is an information function, it defines the attribute value of objective collection X in U. The knowledge expression system can be expressed with a tabular form, herein the columns represent properties, and the line represents the evaluating object. The data table is called “knowledge representation system” (KRS). In order to find out the importance of an attribute or attribute set, the other attributes should be excerpted first and examined how the classified knowledge system changes without those attributes. If the classification of knowledge system will be corresponding change once remove this attribute, it shows the attribute is strong, namely the attribute has high importance, otherwise this attribute intensity is small, and its importance is low as well. 0 The importance of the classification of the attribute subset B 4B can be exported from set C, the authors take the difference degree of independence between those two sub-set value, namely, RB ðCÞ ðCÞ to define the weight of each indicator per below steps: RBB0 (1) Create the index knowledge representation system (KRS) against the father index layer starting from the lowest layer of system, each sub-index forms the conditional attribute set C, the father index namely is the decisional attribute set D, assume C ¼ fa1 ; a2 ; ::ai :::an g. (2) Quantize the knowledge representation system (KRS) and delete duplicate rows. (3) Calculate the conditional attributes value poscai ðDÞ. (4) Calculate the importance of each conditional attribute Pi ¼ rc ðDÞ rcai ðDÞ or use equation (3) to calculate the importance.
mR ¼
jPosP ðQ Þj PosPjRj ðQ Þ jUj
Wi ¼
m X j¼i
aj bij
Herein ai represents the weight of first level indexes to the evaluation target, bij represents the weight of the second level index to the first level indexes. After de related assumption, it requires the determination of the membership degree for each index. Firstly, the authors analyze the characteristics of each indicator to determine its membership function. Then, they substitute the parameter value Xi of each evaluating indicator and their corresponding standard values into its membership function respectively to calculate the membership degree mAðXi Þ. And finally, use the linear weighting method to have a comprehensive evaluation of each indicator equation (5).
P¼
n X
(5)
Based on the comparative results of evaluated objects and the reference objects namely P1 and P2 , the project system management performance degree of low carbon technology integration innovation can be determined.
4.2. Index weight within a case study In order to verify the feasibility and rationality of above indexes, the authors explored 15 construction projects, provided by Shanghai Construction Administration in Yangpu District and Green Energy Technology (Shanghai) Co., LTD., the specific explored data is as follows: all the quantitative indexes originate directly from the original data, the data of qualitative indicators is rated by project team experts from each project and discretized to prevent the data nonuniformity. For the purpose to get more scientific evaluation of LCT integration innovation management performance, five experts were invited to have a score review meeting according to the actual situation of construction project in accordance with the grade index system. Because of the diversity and limitation of the indexes, in practice, the authors simplified the index system and segment the tertiary indexes under the secondary indexes, namely, the system with three aspects were divided according to the safeguard system for LCT integration innovation, the control system of LCT integration innovation management and the management performance evaluation system of LCT integration innovation. The weight of each component index weight were verified, then the calculations for the secondary and primary indexes were ratcheted up accordingly.
Table 5 Assurance system performance assessment scoreboard of LCT innovation.
(3)
(4)
Wi mAðXi Þ
i¼1
Domain
P (5) Normalization: Put PA ¼ ni¼1 Pi , then make out Wi0 ¼ Pi =PA namely as the weight of sub-index ai to the father index. Once the weight of each index has been given by using the above method, it is used to calculate each index respectively of the higher level index. Starting at the next higher level, the comprehensive weight of various indicators from top to bottom could be calculated out per following equation (4):
93
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10 C11 C12 C13 C14 C15
LCT integration innovation assurance system
Exports rating
Z11
Z12
Z13
Z14
Z15
E1
E2
E3
E4
E5
F
2.1% 1.5% 2.0% 0 2.1% 3.1% 1.9% 1.8% 1.3% 2.0% 2.5% 0.8% 1.2% 2.3% 1.8%
45% 29% 71% 35% 60% 35% 25% 71% 50% 45% 48% 10% 75% 100% 23%
1 1 1 2 3 1 1 2 1 3 3 2 2 3 3
1.4 1.21 1.38 1.41 1.72 1.4 1.45 1.40 1.39 1.63 1.3 1.15 1.3 1.65 1.81
1 1 1 1 1 2 3 1 1 3 2 3 2 3 2
85 76 78 74 70 77 82 81 78 80 89 90 84 86 90
76 84 86 82 79 82 79 68 83 92 70 82 86 81 91
83 85 83 80 72 75 75 75 88 88 85 89 89 89 94
75 88 91 83 78 83 92 82 87 85 83 85 92 79 86
82 90 87 88 83 87 90 84 92 79 86 79 95 83 87
241 257 256 245 229 242 251 238 258 253 254 256 271 250 268
94
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
Table 5 is the analysis of the weights determination for the security system. The value in left side of Table 5 is the actual rate of 15 projects, herein, the values of two qualitative indicators (Z13 and Z15) are given by the experts according to the project status with the scale 1, 2 and 3. The right side of Table 5 is the knowledge representation system (KRS), rated by five experts for each project. The authors' team removed the highest and the lowest points to prevent the prejudice and used the total score as a decision attributed F. Then they have a discretization on the data in Table 6, and got a simplified knowledge representation system (KRS) shown in Table 6. Herein: Rate of LCT innovation investment (Z11):1-0e1.0%; 2-1.1%e2.1%; 3-2.2%e3.1%. Portion of LCT engineers (Z12):1-10%e40%; 2-41%e70%; 3-71%e 100%. Is the assessment of low carbon standard reasonable or not (Z13):1-OK; 2-good; 3-excellentOperation cost (Z14):1-1.21e1.40; 21.41e1.61; 3-1.61e1.81. Rate of LCT adoption (Z15):1-OK; 2-Good;-Excellent. F:1-229e242; 2-243e256; 3-257e271. Per Table 6, the authors get below knowledge expression:
U=IndðZ1215 Þ ¼ fðC1; C9Þ; ðC2Þ; ðC3Þ; ðC4Þ; ðC5Þ; ðC6Þ; ðC8Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC13Þ; ð14Þg (6) U=IndðZ11 ; Z1315 Þ ¼ fðC1; C2; C9Þ; ðC3:C8Þ; ðC4Þ; ðC5Þ; ðC6Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC13Þ; ðC14Þg (7) U=IndðZ11 ; Z12 ; Z14 ; Z15 Þ ¼ fðC1; C9Þ; ðC2Þ; ðC3; C8Þ; ðC4Þ; ðC5Þ;
posðZ1215 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC2; C3; C4; C5; C6; C8; C13; C11; C14g ¼ 9
(13)
posðZ11 ;Z1315 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC4; C5; C6; C11; C13; C14g ¼ 6
(14)
posðZ11 ;Z12 ;Z14 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC2; C4; C5; C6; C11; C13; C14g ¼ 7
(15)
posðZ1113 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC3; C6; C11; C14g ¼ 4
(16)
posðZ1114 Þ ðFÞ ¼ fC2; C4; C5; C6; C11; C14g ¼ 6
(17)
posCðFÞ¼fC1;C2;C3;C4;C5;C6;C8;C9;C11;C13;C14g¼11
(18)
Herein, below data are given accordingly:
rcðdÞ ¼ 11=11 ¼ 1;
(19)
rcðZ1215 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 9=11 ¼ 0:82;
(20)
rcðZ11 ;Z1315 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 6=11 ¼ 0:55;
(21)
rcðZ11 ;Z12 ;Z14 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 7=11 ¼ 0:64;
(22)
rcðZ1113 ; Z15 ÞðFÞ ¼ 4=11 ¼ 0:36;
(23)
rcðZ1114 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 6=11 ¼ 0:55
(24)
Furthermore, the importance of each conditional attribute can be calculated as below:
rcðdÞ rcðZ1215 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 1 0:82 ¼ 0:18;
(25)
rcðdÞ rcðZ11 ;Z1315 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 1 0:55 ¼ 0:45;
(26)
rcðdÞ rcðZ11 ;Z12 ;Z14 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 1 0:64 ¼ 0:36;
(27)
rcðdÞ rcðZ1113 ;Z15 Þ ðFÞ ¼ 1 0:36 ¼ 0:64;
(28)
rcðdÞ rcðZ1114 Þ ¼ 1 0:55 ¼ 0:45
(29)
ðC6Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC13Þ; ðC14Þg (8) U=IndðZ1113 ; Z15 Þ ¼ fðC1; C5; C9Þ; ðC2; C4Þ; ðC3Þ; ðC6Þ; ðC8; 13Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC14Þg (9) U=IndðZ1114 Þ ¼ fðC1; C9Þ; ðC2Þ; ðC3; C8; C13Þ; ðC4Þ; ðC5Þ; ðC6Þ; ðC11Þ; ðC14Þg (10) U=f ¼ fðC1; C5; C6; C8Þ; ðC2; C9; C13; Þ; ðC3; C4; C11; C14Þg
(11)
U=C ¼ fC1; C2; C3; C4; C5; C6; C8; C9; C11; C13; C14g
(12)
then: Table 6 Simplified knowledge representation system (KRS) of LCT integration. Domain
Z11
Z12
Z13
Z14
Z15
F
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C8 C9 C11 C13 C14
2 2 2 2 2 3 2 2 3 2 3
2 1 3 1 2 1 3 2 2 3 3
1 1 2 1 1 1 2 1 3 2 3
1 1 1 2 3 1 1 1 1 1 3
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 3
1 3 2 2 1 1 1 3 2 3 2
After the discretization, the weight of each attribute variables can be calculated out as following: Z11 ¼ 0.09; Z12 ¼ 0.22; Z13 ¼ 0.17; Z14 ¼ 0.31; Z15 ¼ 0.21. The authors calculated respectively the weight of LCT integration control system and performance evaluation system in the same way, as shown in Table 7. Based on the above weight verification results, a system performance assessment of LCT innovation for the projects in the construction industry could be formed clearly. Taking the first four typical investigated construction projects above as example (see note)2 to evaluate their performance of LCT integration innovation,
2 Note: Two of the four cases are provided by Yangpu District Construction Management agency in Shanghai city: C1 is a green residential resettlement supporting commercial project (phase I) in Yangpu district; C2 is an ordinary residential resettlement supporting commercial project in Yangpu district; Another two projects are green projects provided by a LEED certification company. respectively C3 is Suzhou lab building (LEED) certification program of UL -CCIC company; C4 is a medical equipment company (Suzhou) office (LEED certificated program).Because the project data has some business confidential concern, the authors' team didn't have further open discussion here, due to the evaluation result they got, shall not affect the conclusions of this study.
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
95
Table 7 Weight of LCT integration innovation evaluation system. 1st level indicators
Weight
2nd level indicators
Weight
3rd level indicators
Weight
LCT integration innovation assurance system (X1)
0.44
Resource input (Y11)
0.11
Regulations input (Y12)
0.07
0.09 0.22 0.17
Technology input (Y13) System integration process control (Y21)
0.19 0.08
System integration management control (Y22)
0.16
Low carbon performance (Y31)
0.15
LCT innovation efficiency (Y32)
0.24
Rate of LCT innovation investment (Z11) Portion of LCT Engineers (Z12) Is the assessment of low carbon standard easonable or not (Z13) Operation cost (Z14) Rate of LCT adoption (Z15) LCT integration innovation input intensity (Z21) Low carbon material (Z22) Low carbon processing technology (Z23) Energy consumption per unit GDP value (Z24) Participants' coordination degree (Z25) Participant conflict management Capability (Z26) Rate of Contract execution (Z27) Carbon emissions of unit building area (Z31) Energy saving rate (Z32) Carbon sink of unit building area (Z33) Yields of LCT integration (Z34) Rate of carbon return of LCT integration (Z35) Social benefit evaluation of LCT integration (Z36)
LCT integration control system (X2)
LCT integration performance evaluation system (X3)
0.34
0.22
the quantitative data is directly obtained from the projects original raw data, some individual qualitative index data are rated by the five experts according to the project actual situation with anonymous grade of comprehensive evaluation. Based on the assessment calculation result, the low carbon technology integration innovation management system performance ranking in priority is C1 > C3 > C4 > C2. From the above weight analysis results of the rough set evaluation and the comparison analysis among the projects, the authors found that the weight ratio of LCT integration innovation evaluation in the three stages of “investment guarantee system, control system and integrated performance management system” is different. In the first phase of “investment guarantee system”, the weight is 0.44, while the second phase, namely, the “control system”, the weight value is 0.34, and the weight in the third phase, the “LCT integration performance evaluation system” phase is 0.22, which shows a steady trend from high to low. This indicates, that the enterprise managers generally paid great attention on the upfront assurance investment and management control in the middle stage for the low carbon technology integration innovation, but put relatively small attention on the low carbon performance and the benefit of low carbon technology integration innovation. In addition, this assessment system can better reflect the overall status in the implementation process of low carbon technology innovation for construction projects. In the above given project, project C1 is the green building, projects C3 and C4 are LEED certificated projects, project C2 is just an ordinary construction project and is not required to have any low carbon or green building certification. The evaluation results match with the actual operation outcomes or project certificates. 5. Conclusion and the way forward The haze weather is getting serious in China right now. How to control the CO2 emissions in construction is becoming an increasingly big issue. Therefore, the promotion of low carbon development model and increasing the investment in low carbon technology innovations, to realize low carbon economy transformation, becomes critically urgent. Based on the evaluation of the international green construction project status and the review of the existing literature, regarding the assessment studies, the process, described in the article, proposes an integrated low carbon technology innovation management system (evaluation framework) from the perspective of
0.31 0.21 0.15 0.12 0.09 0.11 0.15 0.21 0.17 0.15 0.30 0.30 0.05 0.15 0.05
system management. This evaluation system has been divided into three sections: an assurance system, control system and comprehensive performance evaluation system for the LCT integration innovation. It employs the combined methods of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and expert interviews to confirm the indexes of the evaluation system, then discusses the index weight of LCT integration innovation evaluation system with the rough set evaluation method, based on the practical projects in building industry. It is found that: (1) The index weight in the first two sections, namely “protection system and control system”, is higher than this one at the last section of the LCT integration innovation in the construction industry. It reflects, that the enterprise managers normally pay attention to the upfront affordable investment and the middle management control, instead of the low carbon benefits performance evaluation of low carbon technology integration innovation. It is a typical process management approach, but not a result review/management tool. (2) The evaluation system of low carbon technology integration innovation, framed from the perspective of system management, can well reflect the integrity, multi-stakeholderstructure and technology integration of LCT innovation integration. It reminds, the decision maker should take the complexity characteristics of the construction project into consideration, in developing the low carbon technology project evaluation criteria with multidimensional evaluation from the system perspective, instead of “cost” or “low carbon” only. (3) The index weights, proposed with the methods of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and rough set analysis, can well reflect the overall performance of the low carbon construction projects. The selection of indicators has some certain scientific value and effectiveness; its content evaluation will provide the related reference for the enterprise managers to improve the low carbon technology innovation management. Due to the complexity of engineering projects in construction industries, the above research results still leave some limitations, e.g.: when the authors list the low carbon index system of technology innovation in a building, because of the limitations of literature index and the sampling quantity limitation, there are many indicators influencing the performance of carbon emission dynamics
96
X. Lai et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 126 (2016) 88e96
and LCT innovation. It is hard to cover all the aspects and could omit some other indicators less careful. In addition, this framework evaluation system tried its best, in order to adopt the quantitative index and the objective indexes, due to the dynamic and systemic character of the management process itself. Some individual indicators still cannot avoid the pitfalls of qualitative assessment. Herein, the authors will keep on the exploration with traceability research, and will focus on the research of more construction project evaluation and system evaluation, on tracking the latest status of green buildings, low carbon buildings, ecological buildings and sustainable building as well as the management of low carbon technology innovation. Later on, the authors are also going to focus on research activities on behavior model among the various participants, increasing the performance of low carbon innovation integration. The authors will pay attention to the following currently crucial research domains: social technical innovation, concept innovation and energy innovation systems, as well as the evaluation methods and application of interdisciplinary research on the assistance of low carbon technology innovation management. The essence of the development of low carbon economy in the construction industries could be found in the systemic innovation and technological innovation. LCT innovation should excerpt the limitations from the traditional deadlock of technicism and calls for a new management model and evaluation system to enhance the performance of LCT innovation. This article discussed the low carbon technology integration innovation management performance in construction industry, from the perspective of system management, based on the project LCA process. It is a new experiment on performance study of the LCT management for the construction industry, with a purpose to offer a reference for the practitioners, within the context of high public pressure of environmental protection and the problem of energy sources' shortage. It supports the low-carbon industry transformation, if the society adopts a new technology integration innovation management evaluation model. The achievement of this paper is a new attempt of management evaluation of low carbon technology innovation. It has currently a significant relevance in the macroscopic assessment field of energy shortage and environmental protection public pressure. Acknowledgments This research is supported by the Soft Science Research Project of Jiangxi Province in 2015 (No. 20151BBA0033), the Humanities and Social Science Research Project of Colleges and Universities in Jiangxi Province (No.JC1403), the National Social Science Foundation of China (No.11BJY143), and China Post-doctoral Science Foundation Founded Project (58th, No.2015M582393). References Aydogan, E.K., 2011. Performance measurement model for Turkish aviation firms using the rough-AHP and TOPSIS methods under fuzzy environment. Expert Syst. Appl. 38, 3992e3998.
BRE, 2011. Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method. British Academy of Building Research, England. http://www.breeam.org/ filelibrary/Technical%20Manuals/SD5073_BREEAM_2011_New_Construction_ Technical_Guide_ISSUE_2_0.pdf. accessed 24.02.14. Chen, G.Q., Chen, H., Chen, Z.M., Zhang, B., Shao, L., Guo, S., Zhou, S.Y., Jiang, M.M., 2011. Low-carbon building assessment and multi-scale inputeoutput analysis. Commun. Nonlinear Sci. Numer. Simul. 16, 583e595. China Real Estate Chamber of Commerce(CRECC), Elite (China) Real Estate Academy(EREA), 2010. China green residential carbon reduction technology assessment framework. Eco-city Green Build. 0, 30e33. Ding, S.Z., 2002. Organization Management Mod Exploration of Life-cycle Based Integrated Management on Nanjing Subway, 2002. Feb.22. Nanjing metro construction headquarters, Nanjing City China. Dirlich, S., 2011. A comparison of assessment and certification schemes for sustainable building and suggestions for an international standard system. IMRE J. 5, 1e12. Du, D., Wang, T., 2011. Study on the evaluation index system and development comprehensive evaluation of low carbon cities. Chin. J. Environ. Manag. 3, 8e11. Gu, J.F., Wang, H.C., Tang, X.J., et al., 2007. Meta-synthesis Methods System and Systematology Research. Science Press, Beijing China, p. 5. Guo, X.Y., 2004. A Theoretic Study of Marketing Channel Conflict-causes and Management. Harbin Engineering University, Heilongjiang City, China, pp. 1e63. Huang, B., Yang, H., Mauerhofer, V., Guo, R., 2012. Sustainability assessment of low carbon technologiesecase study of the building sector in China. J. Clean. Prod. 32, 244e250. Jia, H.J., Mi, S., Li, H.L., 2010. Research of performance evaluation of low-carbon economic policy in construction industry. Constr. Econ. 42e45. Lent, T., Walsh, B., Meadows, D., Bennett, A.K., Dean, S.W., 2008. Rethinking green building standards for comprehensive continuous improvement. J. Astm Int. 5, 101184e101193. Li, H., Chen, Y., Li, G., Song, G., 2014. Discussion on development of green industrial building evaluation system in China. Ind. Constr. 44, 54e56. Liu, L.B., 2008. Study on the Performance Evaluation of Construction Project Integrated Management. Hebei University of Engineering, Handan City, China. Long, W.D., Bai, W., Fan, L., 2008. Low carbon economy and development of building energy efficiency. Constr. Sci. Technol. 2, 16e20. Magrath, A.J., Hardy, K.G., 1989. A strategic paradigm for predicting manufacturerreseller conflict. Eur. J. Mark. 23, 94e108. Ministry of construction(MOC), 2006. Green building Evaluation Standard (GB/ T50378-2006). Building Industry Press, Beijing, China. Pawlak, Z., 1994. Slowinski R. Rough set approach to multi-attribute decision analysis, Invited Review. Eur. J. Operation Res. 72, 443e459. Robert, F.Cox, Issa, Raja R.A., Ahrens, Dar, 2003. Management's perception of key performance indicators for constructon. J. Constr. Eng. Manag. 129, 142e215. Shi, Q., 2007. Project life cycle based analysis of green building system. Proj. Manag. Tech. 3, 25e28. State Council, 2011. Guofa No.26. In: council, T.s. (Ed.), The Print and Distribute about “Twelfth Five-year” Energy Conservation and Emissions Reduction Comprehensive Work Plan from the State Council, pp. 1e6. Beijin. http://www. gov.cn/zwgk/2011-09/07/content_1941731.htm. accessed 26.12.13. USGBC, 2009. LEED-NC: Green Building Assessment System (V3.0). The United States green building council, Washington, pp. 1e89. Wang, J.P., Wang, C.Y., Yang, S.C., 2011. Evaluation system in the using stage of low carbon buildings. Build. Energy Effic. 39, 62e65. Xinhuanet, 2009. In: Xianzhi, L. (Ed.), China announces Targets on Carbon Dioxide Emission Cuts. xinhuanet, Beijin accessed 05.03.14. Yuan, B., Song, Y.h., Lin, B.R., Zhang, H., 2011. The Australian green building policies and regulations and evaluation system. Constr. Sci. Technol. 64e66. Zeng, H.L., 1996. Rough Set Theory and its Application. Chongqing University Press, Chongqing City, China. Zhang, X.Q., Zhu, Y.Z., Chen, H.X., et al., 2011. Interpretative structural modeling method(ISM) based analysis of low carbon building index system. Commer. Times 12, 120e121.