METHOD TO ALLOCATE COVID-19 PREVENTIVE MEANS OF CONSTRUCTION WORKS BASED ON EXPERT PRIORITIZATION

COVID-19 has severely impacted construction projects, not only by contagions and imposed restrictions but also by dynamically changing supply, work, and labor conditions. Management teams have had to adapt to these dynamically constrained conditions, mostly reacting through trial and error. Since decisions regarding planning, resource, and preventive means allocation must consider multiple internal and external conditions such as restrictions, schedule impacts, risks, and costs; this study proposes a method to evaluate the compared criticality of multiple construction work items and select sets of recommended preventive and reactive means accordingly. A criticality assessment tool was developed in collaboration with 11 academic and industry experts using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, which allowed to weight the compared impact of nine criticality criteria. The empirical application in nine work items from three Chilean construction projects allowed to determine four ranges of critically, where expert’ proposed sets of measures were recommended. The instrument allows assessing the items using a five-level evaluation scale in nine criteria to determine compared criticality, assign them to one of four criticality ranges and obtain a set of recommended actions.