An efficient method for identification of risk factors

Abstract

This paper presents a method to identify risk factors during bridge construction. The method integrates the concepts of analytical hierarchy process and fuzzy consistent matrix method. The advantage of the method is that instead of using 9-point scale of relative importance of the conventional analytical hierarchy process, it uses a 3-point scale to describe the scale of importance, thus greatly simplifying the identification problem of risk factors. Moreover, the difficulties of making judgment and comparison caused by uncertainty that jeopardizes the accuracy of the results in the conventional analytical hierarchy process can also be overcome. Another advantage of the method is that it does not involve consistency checking, thus saving a large amount of CPU time. It has been demonstrated with a numerical example that the proposed fuzzy analytical hierarchy process based on 3-point scale can offer significant computational savings over the conventional analytical hierarchy process.