Review and Analysis of Building Sustainability Assessment Systems, focusing on the Systems Developed for Iran

Building sustainability assessment systems (BSASs) are effective tools to achieve sustainable buildings. The production of these systems in the last two decades has been greatly welcomed and grown. Criteria-based systems are among the most cited categories of BSASs. The development or localization of these systems is done in different ways. In recent years, various types of research have been conducted in the direction of producing or localizing a system for assessing the sustainability of buildings in Iran, which have not been comprehensively reviewed, compared, analyzed, and criticized. In the current research, studies that have provided criteria for assessing building sustainability and/or weighting these criteria for Iran in recent years are examined and the base systems used in each research, the method of selecting these systems, the method of selecting the primary criteria and verifying them, the criteria weighting method, the number and characteristics of the selected experts and their selection criteria have been compared and analyzed, and the structure, strengths and weaknesses, and solutions to correct existing weaknesses are provided. The results of this comparison show that the general method of producing the basic framework of BSASs in studies can be briefly considered as including the selection of basic BSASs, extracting basic criteria from the comparison of basic systems, modifying and verifying the basic criteria and obtaining the final criteria and weighting the criteria. According to the analysis, most of the studies are not focused on a geographical area smaller than the country (a city, area, etc.) or on a specific building function (residential, commercial, etc.). Most of the studies have referred to four to eight BSASs used in the industry to find the primary criteria, among which the widely used and well-known have been the most repeated criteria in the selection of the primary systems in the studies. In the studies in which the criteria have been revised and confirmed, it has been done with the help of experts using different methods and tools such as questionnaires, interviews, and brainstorming. Also, AHP and FAHP methods are the most frequent methods in the studies that deal with criteria weighting. The reviewed studies have strengths such as the consistency of the systems production methods with international methods or the use of a reliable method such as AHP and its variants for weighting; however, they also have weaknesses. Among the solutions presented in the research to correct these weaknesses are: Focusing on geographical boundaries with common environmental, cultural, and economic features, focusing on a specific building function, providing accurate, comprehensive, and relevant criteria for selecting the base systems, referring to the criticisms in the literature to modify the list of primary criteria, and completing and verifying the criteria list using a valid scientific method while defining more precise criteria to choose the experts.