An application of ELECTRE III to contractor selection

Contractor selection is carried out in order to choose a competent and capable contractor to do the work. To help in this selection, baselines are established to ensure that the contractors have the required skills, resources, and abilities to execute the project. Contractor selection is a multiple criteria decision making wherein several criteria are required to be evaluated simultaneously. This paper proposes a decisionmaking model for contractor selection utilizing ELECTRE III modeling. The steps of ELECTRE III model include; estimation of concordance indices, estimation of discordance indices, estimation of credibility scores, performing distillation procedure, and performing complete ranking. To assess alternatives via ELECTRE III, three associated thresholds are defined which are indifference (q), preference (p), and veto (v). These thresholds produce outranking relations with an allowance for data uncertainly. The complete procedure of ELECTRE III modeling is described in the paper. The proposed model is generic and can be used as a tool to evaluate alternatives in several applications such as value engineering, optimum organization structure, and constructability analysis. It enables its users to define the criteria that are deemed important for evaluation. The proposed multiple criteria decision making is novel to construction can be utilized as a successful tool in contractor selection problem. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the use of the proposed methodology. Copyright 2010 ASCE.