A case-based reasoning method for capacity identification in the Choquet integral: Application to cyclic construction operations

The estimation of productivity rates in cyclic construction processes is a crucial task in the planning of construction projects. Since the productivity depends on many factors, the main ones should be selected by taking into account the possible interactions between them. For this aim, we adopted the Choquet integral to define fuzzy weights of criteria or coalition of criteria called capacities. In the literature, many approaches of capacity identification in the Choquet integral are proposed. However, these approaches require information, which is always hardly provided by the decision-maker and necessitates the determination of utility functions. Furthermore, they usually deal with a set of objects having a small cardinality. In this study, we use the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) for capacity identification in concreting operations by developing a new quadratic program. By this way, a selection of "major" criteria is first performed to which a 2-tuple linguistic representation model is applied in order to unify quantitative and qualitative information. Then, a causal model is used to estimate the overall score of the new case. As this work demonstrates, the developed methodology can provide a good tool for capacity identification that is able to justify its choices clearly and consistently in the concreting operations. (C) 2011 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.