The UTC Graduate School is pleased to announce that Md Kamrul Hasan Sabbir will present Master’s research titled, INTEGRATING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF GREEN TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE: A FRAMEWORK FOR EFFECTIVE DECISION-MAKING on 03/24/2023 at 10 AM in CECS Building, Maytag Room.. Everyone is invited to attend.
Engineering
Chair: Ignatius Fomunung
Co-Chair:
Abstract:
Green Infrastructure (GI) is increasingly being recognized as a viable alternative to traditional infrastructure owing to its numerous advantages. GI has the potential to offer economic, environmental, and social benefits to society. However, unlike economic and environmental benefits, the social benefits of GI are difficult to quantify, leading to their frequent omission during comparative evaluations of the benefits of different infrastructure options such as gray/traditional infrastructure or a combination of green and gray infrastructure. By incorporating social and environmental benefits into the evaluation framework, the attractiveness of GI as an alternative infrastructure option can be enhanced for policymakers. This study proposes a framework for integrating the social and environmental impacts of GI into the decision-making process using the Analytical Hierarchy Process and Monte Carlo simulation. A case study was used to demonstrate the proposed framework using only the social impacts, and the results indicated that projects that integrate more GI elements are more cost-effective when decision-making criteria are based on public acceptance and monetary benefits from social benefits over the lifetime of the project. Overall, this study highlights the need to incorporate threefold benefits into the evaluation framework when comparing different infrastructure options, and the proposed framework can assist decision-makers in making informed choices by accounting for the social, environmental and economic impacts of GI in the decision-making process.