Risk assessment influencing factors for Arabian construction projects using analytic hierarchy process

Abstract

Risk management is an approach of recognizing, classifying, analyzing and assessing of all risks in any project and is an important step for project success. Therefore, it is important to analyze and study parameters of construction risks. Numerous methods had developed to support project managers and contractors for risk management in construction. Applications of these methods enabled project managers to avert potential problems. “AHP” Analytic Hierarchy Process was discovered by Saaty (1980), and it had been studied with “MCDM” Multiple Criteria Decision Making; in this paper, AHP was used to normalize uncertainty estimates and rank risk likelihood occurrence which occurs specifically in construction projects in Egypt and Saudi Arabia during bidding and construction phases. The AHP enforcement steps had been simplified through “ECS” Expert Choice Software that is available for its fulfillment. A questionnaires survey was conducted to get opinion of experts for their priorities on most likely risks, which occur in Arabian projects, the answers were used to make pairwise comparison between all risks parameter, then AHP is applied to normalize uncertainty estimates and rank the risk likelihood occurrence. Results show project stakeholders believe that risk from financial as maximum likelihood occurrence of the construction projects. Design risk was the highest second rank most likelihood occurrence after financial risk. Political and construction risk was of the third rank. Keywords: Risk breakdown structure, Risk assessment, Risk analysis, Risk identification, Analytic hierarchy process, Decision making, Egypt, Saudi Arabia