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It is difficult to quantify the intangible benefits of advanced construction technologies and the risks involved in implementing such technologies with the use of traditional economic analysis techniques. An analytical approach to assessing the intangible aspects of technical innovation in construction is presented. The approach uses the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) technique and incorporates both favorable and unfavorable evaluation factors in one framework. The methods for constructing the comparison matrices, measuring the consistency of the pairwise comparisons, and aggregating the eigenvectors for the matrices to produce a final result are discussed. The sources of information for evaluation using the AHP method are identified and the significance of the method as a communication tool for group discussion is addressed. An example evaluation of two tower‐crane alternatives, one traditional and one semiautomated, is given to demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach. The effect of the managerial judgments on the acceptability of a new technology alternative is shown via a sensitivity analysis.
Skibniewski et al. (Tue,) studied this question.