A fuzzy system for evaluating the risk of change in construction projects

A major source of risk in construction is the potential changes occurring during the project lifetime. Changes in construction projects often result from the uncertainty associated with the imprecise and vague knowledge of much project information at the early stages of projects. IT systems for change management largely focus on managing reactive changes, in which changes are recorded and then propagated to the concerned project members. However, proactive change management is hardly dealt with. Proactive change management requires estimating the likelihood of occurrence of a change event as well as estimating the degree of change impacts on project parameters. A fuzzy system is proposed in this paper to maintain these requirements. The system simulates the relationships between change causes and effects, and is intended to facilitate proactive change management on projects. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.