Halting decisions for gas pipeline construction projects using AHP: a case study

Abstract

This paper considers a decision making problem encountered by a natural gas pipeline construction company having a set of ongoing projects and facing unpredictable risks that can result in large deviations from planned schedules. This situation forces the company to consider the decision of halting one or more projects to avoid future losses and to allow for possible reallocation of some of their resources to other ongoing projects. This decision making problem involves different factors and criteria that need to be combined in an organized structure that exploits assessments of experts managing such projects. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is found to be suitable for guiding decisions in this problem. A case study for a major natural gas pipeline construction company in Egypt is presented, where three ongoing projects are considered. The proposed AHP structure, along with collected pairwise comparison scores and calculated priorities, suggests halting one project. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to investigate the effect of changes in the pairwise comparison scores assigned to the main criteria on the final decision. The results and analysis provide some insights regarding the application of the AHP and the relative importance of the factors affecting decisions.