A Fuzzy Risk Management Framework for the Egyptian Real Estate Development Projects

This paper presents a fuzzy risk management framework which enables project management teams to detect and assess critical risk events in Egyptian Real Estate Development projects. The framework introduces three models that include: 1) Fuzzy Expert System (FES), 2) Fuzzy consensus-based model, and 3) Fuzzy Fault and Event Tree analysis model. The Fuzzy Expert System (FES) determines the importance weight factor for the experts, participating in the risk evaluation process, based on their qualifications. The Fuzzy consensus-based model is applied to aggregate experts' opinions in evaluating risks in a linguistic framework. The Fuzzy Fault, and Event tree model is used to support the decision-makers by identifying the critical root causes of the identified risks and hence develop a mitigation strategy to respond to the risks. Literature review and experts interviews identify risk events in order to determine risk categories relevant to real estate development projects. A Fuzzy Consensus Measurement approach integrates experts' opinion in a linguistic framework by computing a consensus weight factor for experts based on the proximity of their opinions on a linguistic scale. Experts' opinions are integrated using both the importance weight factor and the consensus weight factor of experts. Based on the aggregated opinions of experts, a Three-Dimensional Matrix Ranking Approach and preset experts' rules are used to prioritize different risk factors according to their importance to real estate development projects. After detecting critical risk events, a fault and event trees analysis is conducted to calculate the probability of failure of critical risk events as well as the probability of failure of mitigation strategies. Moreover, the event tree analysis computes the cost of success of the mitigation strategy.