Expertise-based bid evaluation for construction-contractor selection with generalized comparative linguistic ELECTRE III

Abstract The process of bid evaluation is subject to indetermination, imprecision, and uncertainty in terms of their alternative-criterion decision appraisals. To address this issue, this paper develops a novel ELECTRE III-based MCGDM approach for bid evaluation, in which generalized comparative linguistic expressions (GCLEs) are used to evaluate bidder performance. The collected GCLEs are further transformed into possibility-distribution-based hesitant fuzzy linguistic-term sets (HFLTSs) to facilitate the qualitative construction of individual expertise. A consensus-reaching process is introduced to promote decisions that are agreed upon by experts and thereby ensure an enhanced state of mutual agreement among the experts. Subsequently, an integrated subjective-objective approach is proposed to calculate criterion weights and to implement an ELECTRE III-based method that incorporates HFLTS possibility distributions, which allows us to treat the indetermination, imprecision, and uncertainty embedded in appraisals of alternative-criterion decisions when evaluating bids. The potential advantages of the proposed approach are validated by a real-life contractor-selection case.