Comprehensive evaluation for construction performance in concurrent engineering environment

As a reformation of work pattern, concurrent engineering (CE) is commonly regarded as a systematic approach to integrated, concurrent design of products and its related processes, including manufacture and support processes. In the past several decades, the application of CE in many industries including construction industry has brought about a great enhancement of productivity. On the other hand, the application of CE has also resulted in a series of problems due to the simultaneous execution of different work phases. Among these problems, performance evaluation in a CE environment is a serious one for decision-makers to determine whether CE should be adopted in their blueprint of innovation. In this paper, a new evaluation method for construction performance in a CE environment based on evidence theory is presented. Compared with existing evaluation methods, it can perfectly deal with some negative influences of CE, such as the diversification of evaluation objectives, incomplete information of evaluation objectives, variance of evaluation indexes. In order to illustrate the viability and adaptability of this method, an example of application is given by this paper.