Applying Evidential Reasoning to Prequalifying Construction Contractors

Abstract

A contractor prequalification process is a typical multiple criteria decision-making problem that embraces both quantitative and qualitative criteria. When facing such problems, a decision maker may need to provide uncertain, incomplete, or imprecise assessments due to a lack of information, time pressure and/or shortcomings in expertise. A multiple criteria decision-making method is then needed in order to deal with such assessments as well as for the meaningful and robust aggregation. This paper addresses these issues by applying an evidential reasoning approach to a contractor prequalification problem. The advantages and disadvantages of applying evidential reasoning to contractor prequalification problems in practice are also reported.