Housing refurbishment contractors selection based on a hybrid fuzzy-QFD approach

With low demand for new construction, limited land usage, and being aware of sustainability, the refurbishment market has grown greatly and has become more in demand in the construction industry. Most refurbishment work, however, involves a high level of risk, uncertainty, and coordination, which are likely to cause asymmetric information between contractors and residents in a refurbishment process. Most private refurbishment contractor selections are usually based on word-of-mouth referrals that lack a systematic and objective assessment method. This Study proposes a hybrid approach combining fuzzy set theory and quality function deployment (QFD) to establish a housing refurbishment contractor selection model. With this model, residents can select an optimal refurbishment contractor according to requirements. To test the effectiveness of the proposed model. a known multiple criteria decision-making method. PROMETHEE, is applied to compare the results of contractor selections. The result reveals that the proposed hybrid fuzzy-QFD approach can be expected to be successful and has potential for handling multiple criteria decision-making problems. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.