Decision Making for Designing Infrastructure Projects: The Case of the City of Larissa, Greece

Decision Making for Designing Infrastructure Projects: The Case of the City of Larissa, Greece Papageorgiou Grigorios, PhD, MSc, MEng, PE ; Alamanis Nikolaos,PhD, MSc, PE ; Chouliaras Ioannis, PhD, MSc, PE ; and Kapsali Polixeni, MSc, PE Abstract Engineers are aware of the fact that uncertainties in planning, designing and studying technical systems and projects are unavoidable. It is therefore necessary to include, in the equipment of engineers, the methods and concepts used to assess the importance of uncertainty in the study of technical systems. According to this position, the principles of probability and related fields of statistics and model development theory, express the uncertainty and allow the analysis of its impact on the design of technical systems. An important role in minimizing uncertainty today, plays the decision-making theory that enables complex problems to be solved under the conditions of the environment in which work is generated. Techniques for managing decision uncertainty depend on the level of knowledge of future conditions, on the number of alternatives under consideration, and on all the uncertainty parameters that appear in the problems. Decision making is a very important aspect of the engineering design process. While many real-world decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty and risk, current undergraduate engineering curricula rarely include any principles of decision theory or use probabilistic modeling and computational techniques. For example, while utility theory is a crucial component of the decision-making process, it is typically omitted in engineering curricula (Chen et al., 2013). This paper describes the aims, methodology and results of an empirical research project. The main purpose is to investigate the factors of work satisfaction in the construction sector of the city of Larissa, in combination with the increase of the employees' performance, while also drawing useful conclusions based on the decision-making theory. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jea.v7n1a13