Construction project risk assessment using combined fuzzy and FMEA

Effectively managing risk is an essential element of successful project management. It is imperative that project management team consider all possible risks to establish corrective actions in the right time. So far, several techniques have been proposed for project risk analysis. Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is recognized as one of the most useful techniques in this field. The main goal is identifying all failure modes within a system, assessing their impact, and planning for corrective actions. In traditional FMEA, the risk priorities of failure modes are determined by using Risk Priority Numbers (RPN), which can be obtained by multiplying the scores of risk factors like occurrence (O), severity (S), and detection (D). This technique has some limitations, though in this paper, Fuzzy logic and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) are used to address the limitations of traditional FMEA. Linguistic variables, expressed in fuzzy numbers, are used to assess the ratings of risk factors O, S, and D. Each factor consists of seven membership functions and on the whole there are 343 rules for fuzzy system. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is applied to determine the relative weightings of risk impacts on time, cost, quality and safety. A case study is presented to validate the concept. The feedbacks are showing the advantages of the proposed approach in project risk management.