A fuzzy group decision making approach for bridge risk assessment

This paper proposes a fuzzy group decision making (FGDM) approach for bridge risk assessment. The FGDM approach allows decision makers (DMs) to evaluate bridge risk factors using linguistic terms such as Certain, Very High, High, Slightly High, Medium, Slightly Low, Low, Very Low or None rather than precise numerical values, allows them to express their opinions independently, and also provides two alternative algorithms to aggregate the assessments of multiple bridge risk factors, one of which offers a rapid assessment and the other one leads to an exact assessment. A case study is investigated using the FGDM approach to illustrate its applications in bridge risk assessment. It is shown that the FGDM approach offers a flexible, practical and effective way of modelling bridge risks. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.