1 A hybrid MCDM technique for risk management in 2 construction projects 3

Multi-stakeholder based construction projects are subject to various risk factors due to 17 dynamic business environments. These risks affect project activities which indirectly impact 18 construction costs, resulting in delays and poor building quality. So, managing these project risks 19 requires suitable risk mitigation strategies to evaluate and analyse their severity. Hence, risk 20 evaluation and assessment of construction projects is a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) 21 problem. In present real-life problems, evaluation of project risks is often uncertain and even 22 incomplete, and the prevailing methodologies fail to handle such situations. To address the 23 problem, this paper extends the analytical network process (ANP) methodology in the D number 24 domain to handle three types of ambiguous evaluations, viz. complete, uncertain, and incomplete, 25 and assesses the weight of risk criteria. The D number based approach overcomes the deficiencies 26 of the exclusiveness hypothesis and completeness constraint of Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory. Here, 27 preference ratings of the decision matrix for each decision-maker are determined using a D numbers 28 extended consistent fuzzy preference relation (D-CFPR). An extended multi-attributive border 29 approximation area comparison (MABAC) method in D numbers is then developed to rank and 30 select the best alternative risk response strategy. Finally, an illustrative example from construction 31 sector is presented to check the feasibility of the proposed approach. For checking the reliability of 32 alternative ranking, a comparative analysis is performed with different MCDM approaches (D33 COPRAS, D-ARAS, D-MABAC, and D-TOPSIS). Based on different criteria weights, a sensitivity 34 analysis of obtained ranking of the hybrid D-ANP-MABAC model is performed for verify the 35 robustness of the proposed method. 36