India is facing a major housing crisis, the gap between the demand and supply of housing stocks are at all-time high since the independence. Various approaches and policies had been enacted to curb this gap in the past. The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) was one such policy which was introduced in 2015 with a goal to construct over 20 million houses. This mega initiative calls for the surge in the demand of resources and materials. The initial deadline for this initiative was set to 2022 while the work status shows the constant delays. One major reason for implementation crisis is the use of conventional technologies/systems for construction. Large scale conventional construction also results in increase in the deterioration of the resources and impacts the ecosystem. Hence the adoption of the new/ alternative technologies has been explored. The implementation of these technologies comes with the challenges pertaining to market characteristics and technological attributes. There are only minimal studies conducted in the area which reflects on the criteria for selection of technologies. Since the existing decision-making systems are based on either one or few criteria, curtailing the system of its benefits. A new multi-criteria decision-making system was needed to efficiently incorporate the criteria and factors for a sustainable construction.

The study aims to develop a decision support system to evaluate the technologies for implementation in affordable housing projects across India. An extensive literature was studied to identify comprehensive list of criteria and factors affecting the selection of the construction technology considering the perspectives of various active stakeholders. These criteria were checked for appropriateness based on various interactions with industry and a preliminary survey. Later, a framework was developed based on the application of an MCDM tool (AHP) to evaluate the criteria. A scoring guide for evaluation of technologies with respect to criteria was developed using existing literature. This resulted in the development of geo-climate specific framework for evaluation of construction technologies. The model was generated and analysed for the context of Chennai. In future, this framework can be incorporated in the mass housing projects as decision support tool for selection of technology prior to the tendering stage. The application of the model is limited to the housing projects whereas framework can be adopted for different construction projects by incorporating additional criteria.
Keywords: Affordable housing, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Sustainable construction.