Dear Jurgita Antuviciene and coauthors

I have read your paper:

“An Integrated Multi-Criteria Decision Model to Select Sustainable Construction Projects under Intuitionistic Fuzzy Conditions”

Jurgita Antuviciene , Sina Salimian, Seyed Meysam Mousavi, Laura Tupenaite, and Jurgita Antucheviciene

My comments are:

1- You say “Moreover, the construction sector is distinguished from other industrial sectors by the long-term nature of its output”

This is absolutely true, and I would add that normally the time for completion of a project, as well as its rate of advance, is different to the others.

2- You say “In the procedure of decision making, the data about attributes are regularly uncertain or fuzzy due to the expanding complexity of the real application situation and the vagueness of the natural subjective reality of human thinking”

I am afraid that I don’t concur with the underlined, because if it is true that the planning, design, and scheduling come from human thinking, it does not mean that the development of a project is related with it. It is more linked with scientific procedures and techniques. In construction projects intervene engineers, geologists, environmentalists, accountants, etc., where they apply what science says, not what they think. I believe that fuzzy may be very necessary to data, not in decision flows.

3- The main aspects that are vague in construction projects are final cost, risk and delays, and in those I believe that IFS can be useful.

4- In page 10 you say “validate the efficiency”

I believe that you can’t validate efficiency, as you do for instance with thermal generation equipment, which has ‘1’ as a limit. In MCDM you can only compute it, since you don’t have a yardstick to compare to. However, there is an indirect way, which consists in determining how much the goal of each criterion is reached.

5- You propose an excellent example, however unrealistic, because you can’t address such a complex problem with only 9 criteria.

6. Table 2 shows the linguistic estimates of alternatives as a function of criteria.

I am not questioning it, but what calls my attention is why you use different experts, when there is abundant and reliable literature from United Nations, OECD, The World Bank, etc., on efficiencies of generation plants of every kind along decades, and most especially trends.

7- I am condensing my evaluation from your Table 16.

To my surprise, it places nuclear power as the preferred, when this type of generation is being shut-down on over the world, and especially in countries like Germany. In may opinion it is because the article considers criteria C7 (CO2) a and C8 (NOx), as costs, as they indeed are, but ignores the tremendous cost of storing for centuries the spent rods from nuclear plants, due to their very high remanent radiation.

It does not consider either the costs and environmental damagelinked with spent wind turbines blades that are just buried. In my opinion, it is also necessary to take into account the small cost of dismantling solar (PV) plants, since all material is recoverable, and not contaminiant.

This is the reason by which I say that this example is not realistic.

From Table 16:

First alternative = Nuclear (6)

Second alternative = Conventional (7)

Third alternative = Hydro (5)

Fourth alternative = Combined (3)

Fifth alternative = Biomass (4)

Sixth alternative = Solar (1)

Seventh alternative = Wind (2)

Numbers in parenthesis how is the actual scenario today:

Solar (PV) (1) is the preferred everywhere

Winds farms (2) are built in all countries

Combined plants (3) are very sought, but they burn natural gas

Biomass (4), has also a big demand, and also detractors

Hydro plants (5), although its preference is decreasing, due to geological reasons and eventual lack of enough water due to global warming

Nuclear plants are being dismantled, although there are a few being built. They are safe but also risky, remember Chernobyl, Three Miles Island and Fukushima.

Conventional plants (thermal), are being shut down, because they are high contaminants, even considering improvement in combustion

Again, look at Germany that started shutting down the existing plants, although recently putting decommissioning it in hold, since 2022, due to the lack of gas from Russia.

8- In page 17 the article mentions “Hence, this figure demonstrates that the final ranking degrees do not change with the various weights of criteria, and these are independent of the weights of criteria in all stages”.

This is strange and counterintuitive, since by changing the weights of the binding criteria, i.e., those that define a solution, they alter the values of the criterion, not changing its slope, but provoking

a modification of the common space ( the polygon of feasible solutions), which normally changes the rankings.

9- The intuitionistic method proposed by the authors appears to work well, however, and I am not analysing them. What is missing in the correct modelling of the problem, and there is not a MCDM method that can remediate it.

It appears that researchers are applying sophisticated mathematical tools to ameliorate data, which of course is necessary, but not paying attention if the decision matrix represents reality, or is simply a proxy of the real problem.

Of course, I will be happy in further discussions of this subject, especially if you don’t agree with my reasoning.

Hope these comments may help.

Nolberto Munier