fuzzy decision support system for application of value engineering in construction industry

the use of value engineering (ve) methodology in construction industry has grown significantly, mainly in view of its extensive benefits. the main task in evaluation phase of ve workshop is to assess alternative ideas, proposed for each function. this phase of ve, hence, could be deemed as a multi criteria decision making (mcdm) problem. this paper presents a fuzzy decision support system (dss) to be employed in evaluation phase of ve. the proposed multi alternative decision model may be recommended where alternatives’ preferences ratios are different, and scores assigned to each alternative idea are uncertain. as use of ve has greater payoffs at the earlier stages of the construction projects, in which most of the criteria are still vague and not precisely defined, exploiting this dss may result in more tangible model of decision making process and satisfactory outlook of ve studies in construction projects. a ranking methodology in a spreadsheet template is also provided to facilitate the ranking process. performance of the proposed methodology is tested using a case example in the tunneling industry.