**1. Introduction**

The concept of sustainable development serves as the answer to the current civilization shifts and the relentless growth of the population, economy, and technology [1]. Many definitions of sustainable development exist, but the most popular one can be found in Brundtland's Report, "Our Common Future" [2]. The concept of sustainable development constitutes, without a doubt, an important research subject from a theoretical standpoint and—from a practical point of view—it determines the direction of development in multiple fields. The concept of sustainable development is increasingly frequently seen in construction engineering, which includes all stages of a building's lifecycle, starting from the design phase, through the construction work, its planning and management, all the way to its usage [3]. In the light of the growing climate changes and legal requirement, energy-efficient construction plays a key role.

Contemporary architectural design and urban planning are also based on the sustainable development paradigm. Establishing sustainable city structures is one of the challenges of modern urban planning [4]. In city policy-making, the assumptions of sustainable models and developmental concepts such as compact city, smart city, or green city are more frequently taken into account [5].

Architecture, urban planning, and construction, including energy-efficient construction are all connected fields that shape our common space and meaningfully impact the environment and climate. Additionally, everyday decision problems in the field of architecture and urban planning and construction, such a selecting an architectural design [6], a revitalization scenario [7], or a construction solution [8], require a multi-criteria approach, the inclusion of various, often contradictory decision factors as well as taking into account the preferences of the stakeholders. Here, methods from MCDM/MCDA (multi-criteria decision-making/multi-criteria decision analysis) groups can serve as important supporting tools.

Multi-criteria decision-making/multi-criteria decision analysis (with multiple-criteria decision-making/multiple-criteria decision analysis being the alternative terms also in use) is a well-known and a well-developed branch of operational research that encompasses various techniques and mathematical tools, which all facilitate the analysis and selection of decision-making alternatives against the pre-defined criteria. What's important, it is an interdisciplinary branch that is based not only on mathematics, but also takes advantage of the theory of economics and IT [9].

The subject matter literature describes various methods and their classification. In general, MCDM methods can be divided into two categories: discrete MADM (multi-attribute decision-making) and continuous MODM (multi-objective decision-making) [10,11]. According to Dytczak, the two fundamental trends should be identified within MCDM: MCDA and MODM. MODM allows for the creation of a set of decision-making alternatives by using mathematical programming. MCDA methods can be divided into aggregation (most well-known methods include the AHP method and its extensions and the MAUT (multi-attribute utility theory) method), as well as surpassing methods (ELECTRE (elimination and choice expressing the reality) and PROMETHEE (preference organization method ranking for enrichment evaluations) families of methods). Because of the diversity and continuous development of the methods, a third group of the so-called remaining methods can be distinguished. These group encompasses the following methods: geometric distance methods (mostly TOPSIS and VIKOR (VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje)), interactive (e.g., RUBIS) or methods of verbal decision analysis (e.g., ZAPROS) [12]. A similar classification was also proposed by Kobry ´n, who added simple ranking methods, such as Bordy, Arrow-Raynaud, or Copeland methods [13].

As proven by overview works e.g., [9,14,15], MCDM/MCDA methods can constitute a universal tool for supporting the decision-making processes in various fields of life and science. It is worth mentioning that the selected methods are increasingly used in architectural design and urban planning, as well as in construction (see examples of the applications in Tables 1 and 2 in the next part of the work). The interest in this subject is growing systematically, which can be confirmed by the already-delivered general overview work, as well as work focused solely on decision-making challenges in the field of construction [11,16].

In this paper, an overview of the MCDM/MCDA methods applied to the selected decision-making challenges in the field of architecture and urban planning as well as construction was carried out. The analysis was narrowed down to issues pertaining to energy-efficient construction. Special attention was paid to decision-making challenges connected to sustainable development paradigms in the selected fields. Moreover, the second part of the work was devoted to AHP method and its modification (FAHP), which most frequently appeared in the overview. A comparative analysis of these methods was carried out. The numerical example concerned the location of single-family residential building with renewable energy sources, and three scales were used in the calculations, including two fuzzy triangular scales.

The primary goal of this paper is to present the application potential of MCDM/MCDA methods in the field of architecture, urban planning, and in energy-efficient construction, while indicating the most popular methods and research problems. This paper consists of four fundamental parts: introduction, literature overview, and a case study presenting the comparative analysis of AHP and Fuzzy AHP. The paper is concluded with the discussion and conclusions that take into consideration the future research directions.


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Source: author's own work.
