Contractor selection using multicriteria decision-making methods

Contractors play a vital role in the overall performance of a project. Selecting the right contractor for the right project is the most crucial challenge for any construction client. Numerous and often conflicting objectives and alternatives, such as tender price, completion date, and experience, need to be considered. Recently, to assist owners in making decisions, there has been a trend away from a lowest-price wins principle and subjective judgement to a multicriteria selection approach in the selection of contractors for construction projects. In the autonomous region of Cantabria, in the north of Spain, increased project complexity and higher requirements have recently demanded the use of multicriteria decision-making methods for contractor selection. With this aim, two multicriteria decision methods, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and vlsekriterijumska optimizacija I kompromisno resenje (VIKOR) methods, are applied to the selection of a contractor for the road building project La Braguía undertaken during 2002. The results show that one of the contractors is the highest ranked by both methods. Being the highest ranked alternative by the TOPSIS method indicates that this contractor is the best in terms of the ranking index. In addition, being the highest ranked alternative by the VIKOR method indicates that it is the closest to the ideal solution.