Fuzzy Preference Relations Consensus Approach to Reduce Conflicts on Shared Responsibilities in the Owner Managing Contractor Delivery System

Abstract

This paper proposes a fuzzy preference relations consensus (FPRC) approach that helps owners and contractors reach consensus on their responsibilities and reduce conflicts in shared tasks. A fuzzy similarity consensus (FSC) model was developed to aggregate experts’ opinions on roles and responsibilities in the owner managing contractor (OMC) project delivery system. The FSC model categorized 324 generic OMC tasks into three responsibility task lists: owner, contractor, and shared. In a consensus-reaching process, the FPRC approach is applied to shared tasks, where expert opinions on responsibility conflict are expressed, to achieve an aggregated responsibility decision for each task. Experts compare the three responsibility alternatives in pairs by using linguistic preferences, defined on a fuzzy preference scale, to select a preferred responsibility alternative for each of the conflicting tasks. A computed linguistic consensus degree guides the experts on their level of consensus in every round of the process. The quality of experts is defined with a fuzzy expert system–determined importance weight factor for each expert. The FPRC approach is relevant to the construction industry, as it incorporates consistency in decision making by allowing experts to measure and reach an adequate level of consensus linguistically when deciding on responsibilities. The proposed approach provides a method of reducing conflicts in the assignment of task responsibility between the owner and its contractors as early as the project initiation phase; thus, the project teams can concentrate on the work to be done rather than deal with responsibility conflicts during project execution.