Multi-Criteria Decision-Making in Construction Contractor Selection
Summary
Selecting a construction contractor is inherently complex, requiring balanced assessment of cost, quality, schedule adherence, safety performance, environmental impact and technical capability. Whereas traditional procurement often prioritises lowest bid price, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) frameworks introduce systematic, transparent and reproducible approaches to evaluate competing proposals. Such frameworks accommodate both quantitative indicators (for example, past delivery performance and financial stability) and qualitative judgements (for example, technical reputation and innovation capacity). They employ structured hierarchies of criteria, weighting techniques and aggregation methods to reconcile conflicting objectives, mitigate bias and enhance accountability. Recent advances have extended classical techniques by integrating fuzzy logic to handle uncertainty, group decision protocols to harness the wisdom of panels of experts and digital tools to exploit rich project data. Overall, MCDM in contractor selection seeks to align procurement decisions with strategic objectives, drive improved project outcomes and foster sustainable practices across global construction markets.
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Multi-Criteria Decision-Making in Construction Contractor Selection publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in multi-criteria decision-making in construction contractor selection across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM): A discipline for evaluating and ranking alternatives based on multiple, often conflicting criteria to support informed decision-making.
Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP): An MCDM method that organises decision criteria into a hierarchy, uses pairwise comparisons to derive relative weights and ranks alternatives.
Building Information Modelling (BIM): A digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a facility that supports collaboration and information exchange across the construction lifecycle.
MACBETH: A multi-criteria decision-analysis technique that translates qualitative pairwise attractiveness judgments into quantitative scores on a cardinal scale.
node2vec: A network embedding algorithm that learns vector representations of nodes in a graph, enabling analysis of relationships within complex networks such as activity–contractor performance graphs.
References
- Performance‐driven contractor recommendation system using a weighted activity–contractor network. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (2024).
- Digitalization and tender evaluation in construction projects: a BIM-integrated MCDA approach supported by Macbeth. Journal of Information Technology in Construction (2024).
- Subcontractor selection using the integration of the AHP and PROMRTHEE methods. Journal of Civil Engineering and Management (2015).
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