Identification and evaluation of social risks in industrial-civil megaprojects with the help of multi-criteria decision-making techniques and system dynamics

Megaprojects play an important role in economics, society, and the environment and during recent years have fast developed. However, due to frequent social involvement induced by the social impact, social risk control has become a big challenge. So, this study is based on the systematic analysis of social risks and behavioural models in megaprojects. This study proposed a model composed of multi-criteria decision-making techniques and system dynamics to analyze the social risks for megaprojects. After choosing the desired risks in the social dimension and obtaining the causal relationships through the DEMATEL-ANP (DANP) method, as seen in the chart, the relationships between the extant variables can be investigated and concluded. The results show that some risks including timely completion of the project and related issues regarding increasing time based on social problems, the extreme internal and external dissatisfaction of megaprojects, and the decreasing risk due to increasing cost are ranked the first, second, and third one, respectively. Also, the extreme internal and external dissatisfaction of the megaproject has the most impact. In this proposed model, the factors affecting the risk related to the timely completion of the project and associated issues regarding the increasing time can be investigated in such a way that the values of this parameter have increased because of an increase in the internal variables, and vice versa. The mutual impact of the variable, the extreme internal and external dissatisfaction of the megaproject, the decreasing risk of the project quality due to excessive increasing cost in terms of social and unpredicted issues, and social interventions of beneficiaries on the timely completion risk of the project and issues of increasing time can be observed. Also, in the below charts, the behaviour of this model has been investigated during 10 coming years by different scenarios. This study can facilitate the perception of social risk in terms of the risk evolution and provide the decision-making support to overcome the social risk with megaproject operation.