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N. Kannusamy Gnanavelan

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Master thesis (2025) - N. Kannusamy Gnanavelan, Daan Schraven, R. Vrijhoef, F. Fröhling, T. Zwart
Circularity is an integral part of the construction industry and numerous initiatives are undertaken by the municipalities and market players of the Netherlands to evaluate and maximize the potential for circularity in their projects. There still remains risks and uncertainties with the application of circular innovations in projects that causes contractors and others to hesitate when choosing circular innovations over conventional technologies. While circularity for buildings has been vastly explored, emerging research also focuses on public spaces. Road infrastructure is an excellent opportunity for the widespread application of circularity due to its standardization and scalability, and it can thus enable the implementation of circular innovations rapidly across diverse landscapes. An important tool to enable the circular transition is decision-making frameworks, that can accelerate the process of choosing circular innovations and checking their performance against other materials, equipment and processes. This Master’s thesis focuses on stakeholder perspectives in the decision-making process of selecting reused and innovative circular materials, with a detailed comparison of alternatives, to create a decision making framework based on the road renovation projects and field labs testing set up by the Municipality of Amsterdam. Through interviews with primary stakeholders from the projects and industry experts, diverse perspectives were captured to define indicators and trade-offs with a Multi Criteria Decision Making analysis, which can systematically combine indicators from diverse disciplines for a uniform scoring scale, using a Research Through Design (RtD) + Action Research combination for the research process. In line with the research objectives, the main research question has been formulated as below:
“How can a decision making framework be developed based on the Amsterdam case study that balances trade-offs in circularity and is evaluated by stakeholder perspectives to rank circular innovations?”
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