**2. Literature Review**

Fuzzy AHP has been used in the literature by researchers in many different fields including project selection by assigning weights to selected project characteristics or criteria based on importance [11]. Bilgen and ¸Sen [12] used a fuzzy AHP to develop a selection tool for six sigma projects. Their selection tool used resources, benefits, and effects as the major characteristics for their FAHP project selection tool. Enea and Piazza [6] used fuzzy AHP to develop a project selection tool based on the following characteristics: risk, cost, impact, and duration. Nguyen and Tran [13] studied the use of fuzzy AHP in construction projects for site selection, contractor selection, construction methods, risk assessment, and other areas related to construction projects. Other examples exist in the literature utilizing the fuzzy AHP methodology in project selection [14–16].

Fuzzy AHP has been used as part of sustainability and sustainable development research in recent years [11] across a broad spectrum of examples. Sabaghi et al. [17] used fuzzy AHP to evaluate product and process sustainability. FAHP was used in their research to assign weights to determine the importance of different economic, social, and environmental indicators in product development. Lespier et al. [7] used fuzzy AHP to quantify and rank key environmental impact criteria in maritime transportation systems (MTS) in an effort to help decision makers improve environmental sustainability

in Maritime shipping. Ligus [8] utilized FAHP to evaluate sustainability in the development of different energy technologies based on determined economic, social, and environmental criteria. Li et al. [9] developed a fuzzy AHP based tool to evaluate the carbon performance of public projects by ranking different carbon emission criteria related to the design, construction, and operation phases of these projects. Other examples of using FAHP to rank the different economic, social, and environmental impacts of sustainable technologies also exist [18,19]. Malik et al. [20] provide a ranking for the following five sustainable project characteristics: technology, economic impact, environmental impact, planning time, and policy to aid in the selection between alternative sustainable projects in Oman. However, since the standard AHP methodology was used to rank these characteristics, the uncertainty in experts' subjective judgments was not considered.

Although previous research demonstrates the use of FAHP to evaluate sustainability and sustainable project development, the focus has mainly been on the selection between different sustainable technology alternatives not necessarily the projects as a whole with an emphasis on the technical aspects of these technologies such as technology efficiency, reliability, scalability, and many other technical aspects in addition to the economic, social, and environmental impacts of these technologies [11]. Even though these technical factors and the impacts of these technologies are important to consider when selecting from different sustainable project alternatives, it is also important to consider the characteristics of these projects as a whole in the selection process not just the sustainable technologies used and their impact. More specifically, there seems to be little research in the FAHP literature that combines project cost and the more neglected, but crucial, project selection criteria of novelty, uncertainty, skill and experience, and technology information transfer and ranking them based on importance in the context of sustainable projects. These criteria can be used to evaluate sustainable projects as a whole regardless of the type of sustainable technology used and location of these projects.
