Composite FMEA for risk assessment in the construction projects based on the integration of the conventional FMEA with the method of pairwise comparison and Markov chain

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to provide risk assessment tool for the construction projects by integrating three methodologies, Failure Mode and Effective Analysis (FMEA), The Method of Pairwise Comparison, and Markov Chain. Design/ methodology/ approach: A literature of the traditional FMEA was reviewed with the aim of demonstrating its framework, highlighting the main advantages and shortcomings, and to study the application of the FMEA in the construction domain. A new methodology named Composite Failure Mode and Effective Analysis (COMP-FMEA) has been introduced aiming at addressing the limitations of the conventional FMEA that make it inconvenient for the construction projects. The integration of the three methodologies provided an improved version of FMEA that considers wider range of criticality factors instead of the traditional three factors (Occurrence (O), Severity (S) and Detection (D)). Additionally, the proposed methodology provides long-term risk assessment using Markov Chain as a correction process for the possible inadequate evaluation during the first stage. Moreover, the interdependence effect between several failures/risks has been taken into consideration for further assessment. Afterwards a case study of a residential building was presented to validate the concept of the proposed methodology. Findings: The results obtained confirm the capability of COMP-FMEA to provide better risk assessment for the construction projects by addressing several drawbacks of the conventional FMEA. The use of the proposed approach can support the project management team with reliable information to establish effective correction action process. Limitations: However COPM-FMEA succeed in addressing several shortcomings of the traditional FMEA and in giving better risk assessment for the construction projects, it still depends on linguistic evaluation for the criticality parameters which provides uncertainty and variety in the experts’ provided information. In addition, COMP-FMEA does not include a corrective actions process, which can be a future research to be integrated with the proposed work.