Techniques for evaluation and selection of partners for construction projects

Abstract

Inter-enterprise collaborations require careful evaluations of partner enterprises and their attributes. Evaluation of partners for a project is a multi-criteria decision making process. The project initiator defines multiple criteria to be used in the selection of suitable partners. This study compares three different multicriteria decision making techniques. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) uses pairwise comparisons of crisp numerical values to derive weights of importance of partners. Fuzzy AHP (FAHP) uses pairwise comparisons of fuzzy values to derive weights of importance. Reduced Group Fuzzy AHP (RGFAHP) computes geometric mean of lower and upper bound fuzzy values to derive weights of importance. Eighty persons evaluated five companies to do structural engineering works for a large building. Their evaluation values were subjected to these algorithms. Total mean relative weights of partners were 0.9936, 0.9968 and 0.9866 with errors of 0.0064, 0.0032 and 0.0134 with time complexities of n(n+6), n(n-1)/2 and n(n-1) for AHP, FAHP and RGFAHP respectively. AHP is effective when dealing with crisp evaluation values while FAHP is effective for fuzzy evaluation values. RGFAHP combines fuzzy approximate reasoning with conventional AHP, reduces the number of comparisons when a large number of attributes are used and deals with imprecise evaluators' judgement.