The construction of bridges has been necessary for societies since ancient times, when the communication between and within towns, cities or communities was established. Until recently, the economic factor has been the only one considered in the decision-making of any type of construction process for bridges. However, nowadays, the objective should not be just the construction of bridges, but of sustainable bridges. Economic, social and environmental factors, which form the three pillars of sustainability, have been recently added. These three factors usually have conflicting perspectives. The decision-making process allows the conversion of a judgment into a rational procedure to reach a compromise solution. The aim of this paper is to review different methods and sustainable criteria used for decision-making at each life-cycle phase of a bridge, from design to recycling or demolition. This paper examines 77 journal articles for which different methods have been used. The most used methods are briefly described. In addition, a statistical study was carried out on the Multiple Attribute Decision-making papers reviewed.

The goal of sustainability involves a consensus among economic, environmental and social factors. Due to climate change, environmental concerns have increased in society. The construction sector is among the most active high environmental impact sectors. This paper proposes new features to consider a more detailed life-cycle assessment (LCA) of reinforced or pre-stressed concrete structures. Besides, this study carries out a comparison between two optimal post-tensioned concrete box-girder road bridges with different maintenance scenarios. ReCiPe method is used to carry out the life-cycle assessment. The midpoint approach shows a complete environmental profile with 18 impact categories. In practice, all the impact categories make their highest contribution in the manufacturing and use and maintenance stages. Afterwards, these two stages are analyzed to identify the process which makes the greatest contribution. In addition, the contribution of CO₂ fixation is taken into account, reducing the environmental impact in the use and maintenance and end of life stages. The endpoint approach shows more interpretable results, enabling an easier comparison between different stages and solutions. The results show the importance of considering the whole life-cycle, since a better design reduces the global environmental impact despite a higher environmental impact in the manufacturing stage.

Sustainable design of infrastructures has become a major matter of study since the recent establishment of the Agenda 2030. This paper provides a systematic literature review on the use of multi-criteria decision making techniques used so far for the sustainable design of bridges. Special attention is put as well on how the reviewed studies assess the sustainable performance of bridge designs along their life cycle from the economic, the environmental and the social perspective. Although SAW and AHP are recurrently used in the sustainable assessment of bridges, the analysis of the most recent articles show that the application of TOPSIS and PROMETHEE techniques are gaining increasing relevance for such purpose. Most of the studies focus on the research of the construction and the maintenance stage of bridges. However, a need for further analysis is identified when it comes to the assessment of the impacts resulting from the End of Life cycle stage of bridges from a sustainable point of view. The use of intuitionistic and neutrosophic logic have been detected as emerging alternatives to the fuzzy approach of decision making problems.