Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ): A Comparison between TOPSIS- and PROMETHEE-Based Approaches for Indirect Eliciting of Category Weights

Abstract

Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) has received a great deal of attention in recent years due to the relationship between worker comfort and productivity. Many academics have studied IEQ from both a building design and an IEQ assessment perspective. This latter line of research has mostly used direct eliciting to obtain weights assigned to IEQ categories such as thermal comfort, visual comfort, acoustic comfort, and indoor air quality. We found only one application of indirect eliciting in the literature. Such indirect eliciting operates without the need for imprecise direct weighing and requires only comfort evaluations, which is in line with the Industry 5.0 paradigm of individual, dynamic, and integrated IEQ evaluation. In this paper, we use a case study to compare the only indirect eliciting model already applied to IEQ, based on TOPSIS, to an indirect eliciting method based on PROMETHEE and to a classical direct eliciting method (AHP). The results demonstrate the superiority of indirect eliciting in reconstructing individual preferences related to perceived global comfort.