A User- Oriented Implementation of Risk Breakdown Structure in Construction Risk Management

Abstract

Construction industry is a complex, dynamic and risky industry that often suffers from poor performance leading in increased cost and time, and in decreased quality. In these conditions the dynamic identification and assessment of project risks among a vary range of potential factors is considered of vital importance. The introduction of Risk Breakdown Structure as a hierarchically organized depiction of identified risks was considered a suitable tool in risk management, especially in construction, due to its many advantages in synthetic representation and dynamic nature. This paper presents a user- oriented implementation of RBS to assist the project managers in identifying and assessing potential risk factors affecting construction process. The evident analogies between WBS and RBS are captured and used in the proposed framework which interconnects them into a 2-D matrix used to associate risks to the specific project activities. The proposed framework is applied to a government funded design- bid- build project. The obtained results clearly demonstrate the advantages in identifying the most risky activities, the most important risk factors affecting the whole project, and the most significant relationships.