Large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM) for performance measurement of healthcare construction projects: Ordinal Priority Approach

People with various skill sets and backgrounds are usually found working on projects and thus, group decision-making (GDM) is one of the most important functions within any project. However, when projects concern healthcare or other critical services for proletariat or general public (especially during COVID19), the importance of GDM can hardly be overstated. Measuring the performance of healthcare construction projects is a critical activity and should be gauged based on the input from a large number of stakeholders. Such problems are usually recognized as large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM). In the current study, we aim to propose a decision support system for measuring the performance of healthcare construction projects against a large number of experts using ordinal data. The study identifies several key indicators from literature and recorded the observations of a large number of experts about these indicators. After that, the acceptable range of complexity is specified, the Silhouette plot is provided to find the optimal number of clusters, and the ordinal K-means method is employed to cluster the experts’ opinions. Later, the confidence level is measured using a novel Weighted Kendall’s W for the optimal number of the clusters, and the threshold is checked. Finally, the conventional problem is solved using the Group Weighted Ordinal Priority Approach (GWOPA) model in multiple attributes decision making (MADM), and the performance of the projects is determined. The validity of the proposed approach is confirmed through a comparative analysis. Also, a real-world case is solved, and the performance of some healthcare construction projects in China is gauged with a comprehensive sensitivity analysis.