The world is facing huge challenges: climate change, increasing population, housing crisis, rapid urbanisation, ageing infrastructures and the Covid-19 pandemic to name a few. These challenges impose significant impacts on us and threats to our future generations. Addressing the complexity and dynamics of the challenges requires innovative engineering approaches for a sustainable future.
Engineering Sustainability provides a forum for sharing the latest thinking from research and practice, and increasingly is presenting the ‘how to’ of engineering a sustainable future. The journal features refereed papers related to the pursuit and implementation of sustainability principles through engineering planning, design and application. Well addressed are the tensions between and integration of social, economic and environmental considerations, through adopting methodologies for measuring and predicting sustainability.
Wrestling with the complex and dynamic challenges requires innovative thinking and methodologies. In the community of Engineering Sustainability, the system boundaries of prefabricated buildings and a smart-technology-integrated approach have been explored to help reduce buildings’ life-cycle carbon dioxide emissions effectively for achieving long-term sustainability of society (Pan et al., 2019). In the wider community of civil engineers, the modular integrated construction (MiC) approach integrated with smart technologies such as real-time module logistics monitoring and automatic module detection has been adopted, which yielded greater construction efficiency and less environmental pollution (Zhang et al., 2021). There is a burgeoning trend of developing innovative frameworks, models and methods as published by Engineering Sustainability and other Institution of Civil Engineers journals.
I have recently taken up the role of Editor-in-Chief of Engineering Sustainability, on 29 March 2022, after serving on the editorial panel for a few years. I see an ever increasingly significant role of Engineering Sustainability for achieving a sustainable future of our industry and society, in particular pushing outwards the boundary of the state of the art. The four papers in this issue are very timely. They evidence innovative thinking and methodology for measuring and predicting engineering sustainability in four important infrastructure sectors, namely, building construction, hotels, bridges and electricity supply.
Zhang et al. (2022) point out that MiC has been introduced for achieving sustainable development, but there is a lack of systematic understanding of its performance. Their paper develops a new framework of 32 key performance indicators (KPIs) in the social, environmental and economic aspects for project stakeholders to comprehensively measure and effectively benchmark the performance of MiC projects. The paper also suggests an eight-step process for project stakeholders to adopt the KPIs to measure MiC performance in three tiers: overall building, off-site and on-site works, and modular works. Through a case study, the paper demonstrates that the framework is effective in measuring the sustainability of MiC and applicable for comparing MiC with conventional practices. The framework contributes a methodological foundation for the future quantitative benchmarking of MiC sustainability.
Wang and Nguyen (2022) share that sustainable tourism has become a global concern. Their paper proposes an approach to evaluate the sustainability of hotels and compare their real actions and promotions. A set of 30 criteria are proposed which are categorised into six main criteria, namely, green building and infrastructure, environmental and monitoring control, green operation and transportation, employee green training, green policies and regulations, and local green culture protection. The paper then uses multi-criteria decision making methods including the best–worst method to calculate the weights of all criteria and the fuzzy technique-for-order-of-preference-by-similarity-to-ideal-solution method to rank sustainability performance. Applied to evaluate five hotels in Vietnam, the results show that the criterion ‘green policy and regulation’ played the most significant role in the sustainability practice of hotels.
Luo et al. (2022) argue that increased temperature and carbon dioxide concentration caused by climate change will aggravate the creep shrinkage and structural durability of concrete bridges. By improving the concrete carbonation model and referring to the B4 model of concrete creep, their paper considers the effects of ambient temperature and humidity on concrete under different emission-reduction scenarios. Meanwhile, a time-dependent reliability model for precast-concrete bridges is established by combining different overload scenarios with climate change to address the serious problems of vehicle overload in China. The results show that as the overload rate increased, the time-dependent reliability degradation rate of a case study bridge accelerated. Under the scenario considering both high greenhouse gas emissions and the maximum overload rate, the service life of the case study bridge decreased to 50% of its design life.
Atalay et al. (2022) emphasise the increasing importance of accurate energy demand modelling to support the policy decision making for ensuring a safe energy supply, and pinpoint that forecasting energy demand has several difficulties due to the complexity of the supply line, demand increase, non-linearity of data and volatility of energy usage. Their paper introduces an improved grey Verhulst model with a constant term (GVMCT) for improving the accuracy of energy demand prediction models. The paper models the total residential electricity demand of both the USA and Turkey by way of linear and quadratic trend models as well as three grey models including the proposed GVMCT model. The effectiveness of the models is assessed based on the mean absolute error, mean squared error and root mean square error. The results show that the linear trend is the best-performing model for the US data, whereas the proposed GVMCT outperforms all models for the data of Turkey.
These four papers contribute innovative thinking and methodology for measuring and predicting engineering sustainability. I am sure they will provoke scholarly debate on and facilitate practical exploration of sustainability in engineering. I would like to encourage submissions to Engineering Sustainability to enrich and further this important discourse, and also applications to join the editorial panel of this journal to facilitate and shape this meaningful and important process for the betterment and sustainability of our industry and society.
