Incorporating utility and cloud theories for owner evaluation in tendering

Success of a contracted project requires collaborative effort from many parties, such as the project owner, the winning tender or contractor, and various suppliers in between. Many studies have been conducted in tender evaluation occurring early in the project life cycle from project owner’s viewpoint. However, responsible tenders are also necessary to evaluate the quality of a potential project owner to ensure that a bid/no-bid decision is correctly made. Such a decision-making problem is likely based on some uncertain factors and imprecise information about a particular owner. Fuzzy theory and probability have been commonly used in general evaluation problems. Since either works within its specified domain, integration of these two approaches within a unique domain becomes a difficult task. In this paper, we explore the usefulness of a novel evaluation model that combines both cloud theory and utility theory together for supporting decision making of multi-attribute evaluation problems under uncertainty. An application of this novel approach to owner evaluation demonstrates that this proposed novel approach is not only useful in dealing with owner evaluation in tendering, but also generic for solving multi-attribute evaluation problems in many disciplines.