Selecting the market for an international construction enterprise

The selection of the target market (i.e., country) is a key decision that affects the contractor’s development prospects and determines success or failure in the competitive international construction environment. Despite its importance, the problem of market selection has been the subject of limited research and few tools have been proposed to help reduce the risk of making the wrong choice. Availability of several compromising/conflicting criteria, the difficulty in articulating and capturing them, and the ambiguities that may arise in their interpretation make the market selection for a construction enterprise a complicated task. This paper addresses this research gap and presents a tool based on a modified Fuzzy Group Analytic Hierarchy Process, which employs a type-2 fuzzy envelope of extended hesitant linguistic term set (EHFLTS) to aggregate the decision-maker’s judgments. Using extended hesitant linguistic terms, the comparative linguistic expressions (CLEs) generated using context-free grammar (CFG) enable the decision-maker(s) to express their preferences in a way that resembles a natural language. They also help to capture the hesitation in prioritizing the available options. The process of computing with word (CWW) with CLEs is implemented through EHFLTS envelopes. To illustrate the method’s principles of operation, a hypothetical case of selecting the best market for the construction enterprise is introduced.