Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence: potential usage for decision making and risk analysis in construction project management

Decision making and risk analysis are essential tasks along the project life cycle. Researchers have researched different theories and have come up with various tools and methodologies to assist practitioners in assessing risk and making more informative decisions in the case of uncertainty. Many Decision Support Systems (DSSs) are available for practitioners. Unfortunately, in reality such tools are rarely used. Instead, practitioners used to relay upon their personal judgment, past experience, intuition and gut feeling. Having conducted an extensive literature review, the authors identified the limitations of the extensively used Probability theory (PT), Fuzzy Sets Theory (FST) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) for decision making and risk assessment in construction industry. We believe that Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence (DST) could provide a valid alternative. Incomplete information and ignorance, which are typical problems in construction industry, could be better handled by using distributed belief assessments. Dempster rule of evidence combination can be used for aggregating risk assessments which may be a novel alternative to the simple averaging procedures adopted by researchers when deploying the FST.