Design and pilot run of fuzzy synthetic model (FSM) for risk evaluation in civil engineering

Abstract

Most of the current construction risk assessment tools deliver unsatisfactory results because the prerequisite for their effective applications rely on the availability of high quality data especially during the early stage of a project. Unfortunately, such data are limited, ambiguous or even not exist due to the great uncertainty inherent in construction projects. Based on Fuzzy Synthetic Analysis (FSA), a model development team was formed among construction engineers, IT professionals, and Mathematicians in developing a holistic risk assessment model to estimate the construction risks especially for the situations with incomplete data and vague environments. Through qualitative scales defined by triangular fuzzy numbers used in pairwise comparisons to capture the vagueness in the linguistic variables, a risk assessment model using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was developed. The Pilot Run revealed the developed Fuzzy Synthetic Model (FSM) could accelerate the decision-making process and provide optimal allocation of project resources to mitigate possible risks detrimental to the success of a project in terms of time, cost, and quality.

Keyword : Fuzzy-AHP, Fuzzy Multi-criteria Decision Analysis, Triangular Fuzzy numbers, risk assessment, Fuzzy linguistic scale