Existing risks in deep foundation excavation projects is a major issue in developing cities. With the rapid increase in the number of various deep foundation and excavation projects in big cities of ...Iran, many accidents related to deep excavation have been reported every year. These accidents affected delay and increased cost of project implementation. Therefore identification and assessment of risks of these accidents is essential. The aim of the research was to develop a framework to overcome limitations of previous approaches to assess of risks in excavation projects. According to the complexity of a problem and the inherent uncertainty, the framework adopted SWARA (Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis) and COPRAS (COmplex PRoportional ASsessment) methods through introducing new criteria for risk assessment. Data was collected through interview, a literature review and a questionnaire survey distributed to excavation project experts. A case study of deep foundation excavation in Shiraz was presented. The results have shown that the risks involving construction safety, unfavourable geological conditions, shortage of managerial experience, incomplete emergency plan and subsidence of ground are the most significant risks excavation projects in Shiraz. The proposed framework and the obtained results can help stakeholders of excavation projects in developing countries better to manage project risks.
Infrastructure projects (IPs) face numerous challenges to reach the predefined aims over their life-cycle. There are many difficulties in projects because of the variety of elements in project’s ...tendency and the dependency of the project on mainly national factors. Due to these difficulties and their practices, the projects meet with uncertainty. In this paper, an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy set (IVIFS) is used at identifying ambiguity in IPs. Also, a new multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model is presented to evaluate and select the suitable alternative in IPs. Hence, a new IVIF-relative preference alternative-multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (IVIF-RPR-MABAC), and IVIF-weighted aggregated sum product assessment (IVIF-WASPAS) are proposed in order to obtain the weights of decision makers (DMs) and criteria, and a new IVIF-RPR-MABAC method is proposed to rank the alternatives. In this paper, a combination of the three mentioned approaches creates proposed new hybrid model to evaluate the main factors and the projects. Furthermore, a real case study is applied from the literature to validate the efficiency and performance of the proposed model. Afterward, a comparative analysis is presented to validate the proposed approach by comparing the hybrid proposed model with two IVIF-TOPSIS and IVIF-extended-VIKOR methods. The final results confirm the efficiency of the proposed model in ranking the main alternatives of an MCDM problem. Moreover, the sensitivity analysis is reported to determine the affection of parameters on the final weighting and ranking outcomes.
To design solutions for occupational safety at a construction site for the construction technology project, an occupational hazard was assessed. Possible solutions for occupational safety depend on ...the number of criteria such as hazardous factors from which workers must be protected; the number of danger zones; architectural-design and structural solutions of a building; types of technical protection measures, etc. A large set of solutions for occupational safety predetermines the number of respective typical (or repeated) solutions, which are based on specific technical safety measures and are applicable depending on a hazardous factor; besides, it determines systematisation of the solutions on these grounds. It is suggested to use the Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique for assessment and selection of appropriate solutions for occupational safety. The authors propose formulating assessed alternatives from the typical solutions to ensure their quality and then apply the entropy method for determining relative significances of evaluation criteria and, finally, use Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method for ranking of alternatives.
One of the important activities of a company that can increase its competitiveness is market segment evaluation and selection (MSE/MSS). We can usually consider MSE/MSS as a multi-criteria ...decision-making (MCDM) problem, and so we need to use an MCDM method to handle it. Uncertainty is one of the important factors that can affect the process of decision-making. Fuzzy MCDM approached have been designed to deal with the uncertainty of decision-making problems. In this study, a fuzzy extension of the CODAS (COmbinative Distance-based ASsessment) method is proposed to solve multi-criteria group decision-making problems. We use linguistic variables and trapezoidal fuzzy numbers to extend the CODAS method. The proposed fuzzy CODAS method is applied to an example of market segment evaluation and selection problem under uncertainty. To validate the results, a comparison is performed between the fuzzy CODAS and two other MCDM methods (fuzzy EDAS and fuzzy TOPSIS). A sensitivity analysis is also carried out to demonstrate the stability of the results of the fuzz CODAS. For this aim, ten sets of criteria weights are randomly generated and the example is solved using each set separately. The results of the comparison and the sensitivity analysis show that the proposed fuzzy CODAS method gives valid and stable results.
VIKOR is a well-defined multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) method since it reflects different risk attitudes of decision-makers by measuring the overall performance of an alternative under all ...criteria as “group value” and the worst performance of the alternative under all criteria as “individual regret”, but it cannot deal with MCDM problems where the criteria of different alternatives are inconsistent (different) and the decision information is uncertain. To address these problems, we present a probabilistic linguistic VIKOR method by combining with probabilistic linguistic term sets which portrays uncertain information such as individual hesitancy and incomplete belief flexibly. In addition, we introduce the aspired and tolerable values of criteria as reference points to measure the closeness degrees of alternatives to the ideal solution. To compare group values and individual regrets of different alternatives, we develop a vector normalization method that considers the number of criteria. The robustness of the aggregation results of group values and individual regrets is improved based on the extended Borda rule, which takes into account both values and ranks of alternatives in the aggregation. A case study of personnel evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method for solving MCDM problems with inconsistent criteria and uncertain decision information.
The Journal of Civil Engineering and Management (JCEM) is a prestigious international journal in the field of engineering. This paper uses the method of bibliometric to study the status and ...development trends of the journal. Information was collected from the Science Citation Index (SCI) database. Firstly, the general citation structure and basic characteristics of the JCEM journal are investigated. Then, the most influential institutions, countries as well as their networks of cooperation are identified. Finally, the main research topics of the JCEM journal are explored by using the frequently used keywords. This paper explores the internal structure and development trend of the JCEM journal, which not only provides an important reference for the future development of this journal, but also provides an effective analysis method for the future evaluation of journals.
This paper presents a new optimization model and a new interval type-2 fuzzy solution approach for project portfolio selection and scheduling (PPSS) problem, in which split of projects and ...re-execution are allowable. Afterward, the approach is realized as a multi-objective optimization that maximizes total benefits of projects concerning economic concepts by considering the interest rate and time value of money and minimizes the tardiness value and total number of interruptions of chosen projects. Besides, budget and resources limitation, newfound relations are proposed to consider dependency relationships via a synergy among projects to solve PPSS problem hiring interval type-2 fuzzy sets. For validation of the model, numerical instances are provided and solved by a new extended procedure based on fuzzy optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints regarding several situations. In the end, their results are studied. The results show that it is more beneficial when projects are allowed to be split.
A variety of fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) models have been proposed to solve complicated decision-making problems. Many applications have been achieved, especially in the field of ...civil engineering. To analyze the developments about the fuzzy MCDM methods and their applications in civil engineering in recent years and further explore the future research directions, this study conducts a state of the art survey in which 52 journal papers focusing on the applications of fuzzy MCDM models in civil engineering from 2016 to 2020 are reviewed. We respectively classify these articles according to research problems and research methods. Through the literature review, we get findings in terms of the most concerned decision-making problem, the most widely-used evaluation criterion and the most popular fuzzy MCDM model. Furthermore, we present four aspects of research challenges and corresponding future research directions in the field of civil engineering, which may be helpful for researchers and practitioners to further investigate.
In recent years, the world economy has experienced rapid economic change in the construction sector and record inflation. The rapidly rising prices of construction materials and machinery in the ...construction market are also pushing up the cost of construction services. The main problem is that construction projects have been drawn up and contracts between clients and contractors have been awarded at previous prices, and it is therefore necessary to look for opportunities to index the price of construction contracts. The aim of the study is to propose a mathematical model and a smartphone application for the price recalculation of construction projects. The success of a construction project depends on the correct decisions taken at the stage of preparation and implementation of the procurement documents for construction contracts, a complex process requiring a lot of legal and technological knowledge. The proposed mathematical model would help clients and contractors to carry out the calculation of the price according to the construction price index quickly and without the need for extensive specialist technical expertise. The mathematical model is adapted to smartphones with Android software.
Seeking for saving traditional forms, sizes, proportions and other features of vernacular architecture and satisfying norms for a contemporary building sometimes is not an easy task. The presented ...case study about indoor daylighting in Lithuanian vernacular architecture shows the existing problem. The authors of the article suggest possible variants of how to improve daylighting in vernacular buildings. The aim of the conducted research is to propose a rational solution to the problem using multiple criteria assessment. Alternative variants can be characterized by a number of quantitative and qualitative criteria. Thus, for ranking alternatives and achieving the most rational solution, the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to evaluate the relative importance of criteria as well as the application of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods are put forward. The case study presents possible alternatives for improving daylighting in the reconstructed building and simultaneously analyses the process of saving the features of vernacular architecture applying the AHP for weighting criteria and Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS), Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) for ranking alternative solutions. It is estimated that the utility degree of the best ranked alternative exceeds the further ranked alternatives from 29 to 49 percent.
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