An interval type-2 fuzzy prioritization approach to project risk assessment

Assessment of project risks generally requires dealing with vague and imprecise information as well as highly subjective judgments of a group of experts. Therefore, it is often unrealistic and impractical to acquire exact judgments in project risk assessment. Several precision- and fuzzy-based methods, addressing this issue, have been suggested in the literature. However, these studies entirely or partly have ignored certain sources of uncertainties, especially subjectivity and variations among expert judgments. This paper proposes an interval type-2 fuzzy prioritization approach that effectively models the project risk assessment process. The approach captures at least two types of uncertainties associated with judgments elicited from a group of experts: intra-personal uncertainty and inter-personal uncertainty. In order to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach, an example is presented for the assessment of potential risks in new product development projects. Comparisons with current precision- and fuzzy-based methods demonstrate that the proposed approach offers additional flexibility to the experts in making judgments and provides a better representation of uncertainty.