An Evidential Reasoning based Decision Making Process for Pre-qualifying Construction Contractors

An evidential reasoning (ER) approach is applied to evaluate pre-qualification criteria in selection of a main contractor. This approach has proved to be useful and practical when a decision problem under consideration includes multiple criteria, which are of both a quantitative and qualitative nature. In this type of problem, a major difficulty is how to aggregate numerical data and subjective assessments in order to evaluate potential alternative contractors. A contractor pre-qualification problem (CPP) is investigated to show how the ER approach can overcome this difficulty. The decision making process is fully explained using the ER approach together with discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of the model presented.

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