Reliability measures in multicriteria decision making as applied to engineering projects

This paper contains two examples of a combined application of MultiCriteria Decision Making (MCDM) and reliability analysis. The examples illustrate a theoretical discussion presented by the first two authors in the same issue of the journal. The first example is concerned with a comparative planning and arranging of building construction process. The second one has to do with comparison between alternative designs of a floor structure. Reliability of alternative construction plans and failure probabilities of alternative arrangements of the floor structure are taken as attributes used to MCDM. Various normalisation methods and decision-making criteria are applied to solving problems considered in the examples. It is demonstrated that reliability measures used to MCDM can create interdependence between attributes of the alternatives under comparison. Introducing reliability measures into decision making generates the need to replace traditionally deterministic attributes with characteristics of random quantities such as mean values. It is concluded that introducing reliability measures into MCDM problems requires an effort mainly at a formulation of these problems.