Evaluation and Prioritization of Construction Projects on the Basis of Risk Factors Using ANP - DEMATEL - TOPSIS Integrated Approach in Fuzzy Conditions

Construction projects initiate in complicated dynamic environments and due to the close relationships between project parameters and the unknown outer environment, they are faced with several uncertainties and risks. Success in time, cost and quality in large scale construction projects is uncertain in consequence of technological constraints, large number of stakeholders, too much time required, great capital requirements and poor definition of the extent and scope of the project. Projects that are faced with such environments and uncertainties can be well managed through utilization of the concept of risk management in project’s life cycle. Although the concept of risk is dependent on the opinion and idea of management, it suggests the risks of not achieving the project objectives as well. Furthermore, project’s risk analysis discusses the risks of development of inappropriate reactions. Since evaluation and prioritization of construction projects has been a difficult task, the network structure is considered to be an appropriate approach to analyze complex systems; therefore, this structure has been used for analyzing and modeling the issue. On the other hand, inadequacy of data in deterministic circumstances was faced, and additionally the experts’ opinions are usually mathematically vague and are introduced in the form of linguistic variables instead of numerical expression. Owing to the fact that fuzzy logic is used for expressing the vagueness and uncertainty, formulation of experts’ opinion in the form of fuzzy numbers can be an appropriate approach. In other words, the evaluation and prioritization of construction projects on the basis of risk factors in real world is a complicated issue with lots of ambiguous qualitative characteristics. In the present thesis, a combination of fuzzy DEMATEL, fuzzy analytic network process (ANP), and fuzzy TOPSIS was used for the first time for evaluation and prioritization of construction projects on the basis of risk factors. The fuzzy DEMATEL method was used for extraction of the relationships between main risk factors and their sub-criteria. The weight of main risk factors and their sub-criteria was determined by considering the inter-relationships among main risk factors and their related sub-criteria in the fuzzy ANP. Afterwards, these weights were applied into the fuzzy TOPSIS method, and eventually the fuzzy TOPSIS was used for prioritizing the construction projects. The proposed hybrid model is used for prioritization of six construction projects on the basis of risk factors. Keywords: Risk Factors, Construction Project, Fuzzy DEMATEL, Fuzzy ANP, Fuzzy TOPSIS, Project Prioritization.