Building investments are often assessed through measures such as life-cycle cost, net present value and payback. These measures capture monetary costs and benefits, but decision-makers may also need to consider attributes that are difficult to express in monetary terms, including accessibility, security, maintainability, and the quality of the visual and acoustic environment. Multiattribute decision analysis (MADA) provides a structured way to compare a finite set of alternatives across several relevant attributes.
The report reviews 14 classes of MADA methods and discusses how they support screening, ranking and selecting alternatives, along with their data needs and scoring approaches. It gives detailed guidance on two methods: the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Non-Traditional Capital Investment Criteria (NCIC). AHP uses pairwise comparisons to establish attribute weights and can structure criteria in a hierarchy. NCIC also uses pairwise comparisons and expresses final scores in monetary terms, helping make the implied value of non-monetary attributes explicit. The report illustrates their use through hypothetical choices involving a company headquarters and a branch-office location.
For building-related decisions, the report discusses choices among buildings, building components, materials and locations. It presents a set of building-related attributes that analysts can adapt to the decision at hand, rather than applying one fixed list to every case. The authors also describe assumptions and limitations of both AHP and NCIC. The results therefore depend on how decision-makers define alternatives, select and weight attributes, and apply the method; the analysis supports structured comparison but does not remove the need for informed judgement.
