Fuzzy Decision Support System for Application of Value Engineering in Construction Industry

The use of value engineering (ve) methodology in construction industry has grownsignificantly, mainly in view of its extensive benefits. the main task in evaluation phase of veworkshop is to assess alternative ideas, proposedfor each function. this phase ofve, hence, couldbe deemed as a multi criteria decision making (mcdm) problem. this paper presents a fuzzydecision support system (dss) to be employed in evaluation phase of vee the proposed multialternative decision model may be recommended where alternatives' preferences ratios aredifferent, and scores assigned to each alternative idea are uncertain. as use of ve has greaterpayoffs at the earlier stages ofthe construction projects, in which most ofthe criteria are still vagueand not precisely defined, exploiting this dss may result in more tangible model ofdecision makingprocess and satisfactory outlook of ve studies in construction projects. a ranking methodology ina spreadsheet template is also provided to facilitate the ranking process. performance of theproposed methodology is tested using a case example in the tunneling industry.