Challenges review of decision making in post-disaster construction

Abstract

As a natural disaster occurs, it negatively affects and destroys a large scale of urban pattern in a short period of time. Building a structure in such situations is considered a process that encompasses broad topics such as social, economic, and environmental issues linked together and interrelated. In addition, many of these tasks have conflicting nature towards one another, making it difficult to manage the process as a whole. This research aims to review: (1) The different data-mining-based methods used in post-disaster, and (2) The practice and research trends in disaster resilience and disaster risk reduction literature published in the last two decades. Finally, future work and research challenges are recommended to help the decision-making research community set a clear agenda for the upcoming research. The researchers have identified 150 academic papers from the last two decades through text mining using the ‘Engineering Village’ database. The search considered high-ranked peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and most cited documents. Post-disaster housing heavily relies on tacit knowledge instead of hard measurable data like any construction field. There is a lack of decision-making studies in the post-disaster topic using hard data. Therefore, it is essential to consider any measurable factors that stem from the environment compared to relying only on expert opinion, as using solely tacit knowledge is ineffective. In addition to this, there have not been enough studies on this matter using a combination of hard data and tacit knowledge. A step towards understanding different work areas in disaster resilience, the researchers identified, categorized, and grouped the literature review based on different fields of post-disaster decision-making. Moreover, the research identifies and discusses the most frequent topics and techniques of multi-objective decision-making in post-disaster situations. This article is the first to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the challenges and constraints for decision-making in post-disaster construction.