Evaluating Efficiency in Construction Projects with the TOPSIS Model and NDEA Method Considering Environmental Effects and Undesirable Data

Today, project stakeholders seek to reduce the total costs and durations of projects while increasing their quality levels. Also, the governments have paid more attention to the environmental effects of projects. This study tackles the time–cost–quality-environmental effects trade-off project scheduling problem. Various activity execution modes are evaluated using the network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) method to select the best modes in order to mitigate the environmental impacts, along with reducing the duration and cost of project implementation and enhancing the overall quality of the project. The method of ideal and anti-ideal virtual units is applied to rank the efficient execution modes. In addition, the TOPSIS method is utilized to rank the different execution modes of each activity. Finally, the results of two methods are compared. The findings show that the selection of an efficient execution mode for each activity leads to a trade-off between the four project objectives including time, cost, quality, environmental impacts. The shortest project duration and the lowest total project cost were obtained using the NDEA-Nuo method, the highest quality level was gained by the NDEA-INP method, and the minimum environmental impacts of the entire project were attained by the TOPSIS method. Also, the lowest amount of resource consumption was obtained using the TOPSIS method, so that the daily consumption amount of each resource was less than the other two methods. As a result, the project management team can apply either the NDEA or TOPSIS method based on the organizational policy.