Identifying and Evaluating Risks of Construction Projects in Fuzzy Environment: A Case Study in Iranian Construction Industry

Abstract

There is uncertainty in success of large scale construction projects in terms of time, cost, and quality due to technological constraints, large number of stakeholders, long time, much capital requirements, and improper definition of scope of the project. Such projects with uncertain environment can be managed using the risk management concept in the project life cycle. Although concept of the risk depends on the management's opinions, it represents obstacles on not meeting the project's goals as well. In addition, analyzing the risk of the whole project can present perils regarding the extension of improper reactions. The present paper presents a quantitative method based on the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach to manage the risk of construction projects in the uncertain environment. To do so, after identifying all risk factors, fuzzy AHP is applied to determine the priority of risk factors. The priority of risk factors could help construction project managers to do preventive attempts. The proposed method applied the fuzzy AHP approach such that it covers uncertainty present in the experts' opinions.