Risk ranking of tunnel construction projects by using the ELECTRE technique under a fuzzy environment

Ranking the risks imposed by tunneling projects is one of the most important tasks in the process of risk management. Recognizing the riskiest component enables managers to plan efficiently for adopting risk reduction measures. The first stage regarding this issue is to define the potential risky parameters and then establish an order among them. Therefore, managers always look for a reliable technique to manage the limitations of finance and time. The ELECTRE technique is a powerful method among multicriteria decision-making methods that is capable of modeling complex and sophisticated systems and sub-systems. Since the process of risk ranking is a complicated and uncertain problem, and fuzzy logic is capable of dealing with the existing uncertainty in decision-making, in this research the fuzzy ELECTRE method has been employed. To demonstrate the capability and effectiveness of the proposed model, a real-world case study, Tehran’s line 7 subway project, is implemented. The results show that ’damages and accidents of machinery’ and ‘unsafe working conditions’ are located in the highest rank. Whereas, ‘delay in project completion’ and ‘failure of equipments’ are ranked as the least important components.

Keywords: risk ranking; fuzzy ELECTRE; Tehran subway; multicriteria decision-making