With society turning increasingly to sustainable development, sharper demands are being made concerning energy efficiency and other properties that mean reductions in the negative effects of the building on the environment and people. This means that architects must have a suitably adapted solution already in the early design phase, as this has the greatest influence on the final result. Current tools and methods used for this are either focused only on individual topics or are too complex and not adapted for independent use by architects. The paper presents a simplified method for evaluating building sustainability (SMEBS) which addresses these needs. It is intended as a tool to aid architects in the early project planning phases as it allows a quick evaluation of the extent to which the demands of sustainable building are fulfilled. The method was developed on the basis of a study of international building sustainability assessment methods (BSAM) and standards in this field. Experts in sustainable construction were invited to determine weights for assessment parameters using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Their judgments reflect the specific characteristics of the local environment.

Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is one of the multicriteria decision-making methods based on asymmetric linguistic comparison matrices that has received a great deal of attention, and it is a widely used method in various fields. One of the drawbacks of DEMATEL is a convergence problem that may occur when the infinite sum of normalized influences does not converge. Based on the observations of some examples, the new concept of DEMATEL, the DEMATEL of a finite sum of influences (FSI DEMATEL), is proposed. Instead of an infinite sum, a finite sum of influences is used in FSI DEMATEL so that the convergence problem is avoided. The advantage is that FSI DEMATEL can handle more decision-making problems than the DEMATEL. It can also be used for fuzzy evaluations. FSI DEMATEL can be used as the multicriteria decision-making method to evaluate the relationships between the factors in many different fields.