Group-analytic network process for balancing stakeholder views on fire protection of steel-framed buildings

To select appropriate fire protection options for buildings during their design stage, economic, safety, environmental, and societal criteria need to be accounted for. The divergent and sometimes conflictual desires from different fire design stakeholders involved in the process present a multicriteria decision problem. Design decision criteria and fire protection options can be interdependent, and so there is a need to manage these desires with an advanced decision analysis technique, thereby reducing uncertainties in the complex decision‐making process. The aim of this paper is to use the weighted/geometric mean method‐analytic network process (W/GMM‐ANP) to balance the opinions of fire design stakeholders extracted from 42 structured stakeholder interviews on selecting the most suitable fire protection option for buildings constructed of steel frames. Different categories of interdependent decision elements were developed from 22 design decision criteria and 5 proposed fire protection options to produce a network of decision clusters for multicriteria decision analysis. In the synthesis and ranking of fire protection options, the W/GMM‐ANP accounted for the multiple interdependencies of weighted and unweighted stakeholder desires and managed the complexity of the decision‐making problem. The technique is proposed for approaching suitable group decisions in structural fire design of steel‐framed buildings as well as other performance‐based engineering decision making that may involve multidisciplinary stakeholders.