VIKOR method for ranking concrete bridge repair projects with target-based criteria

With the development of intelligent and automated information system in the information era, the need for more efficient decision making method is growing. An effective method used to rank concrete bridge projects affected by reinforcement corrosion damage will help decision makers of bridge management agencies to better understand the different degrees of urgency for each project. The priority ranking process of different bridge repair projects is complex, since it is hard for decision makers to directly decide which bridge has higher priority when considering many criteria at the same time. The ranking of the different bridge repairing projects can be similar to solving multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problems. The VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizcija I Kaompromisno Resenje in Serbian) method is a distance-to-target method which is developed and used to solve MCDM problems in material selection research. Since weights play a significant role in the priority ranking problems, objective weights based on Entropy concept and Target-based standard deviation method and dependent weights are also applied in this study. Several important criteria, which have not been considered in previous literatures, are proposed and the influence of these criteria to the bridge condition is checked and verified by using data information in NBI databased. A numerical example is proposed to illustrate the application of proposed method. Therefore, in this research a new ranking system methodology based on weighted VIKOR method with proposed criteria for ranking bridge projects is presented.