Applying verbal decision analysis on the choice of materials to the construction process of earth dams

Abstract

The choice of materials to be used on the construction of earth dams is made in an empirical way, taking into account previous projects and the experience of the involved engineers. An engineer often specifies the materials and their quantities that will be used based on previous projects, on the geotechnical information about the materials available and on common sense. In order to improve this process we propose a multicriterion model to aid in the decisions making concerning the choice of materials on the construction of earth dams with homogeneous and zoned sections. This will be made by means of the Aranaú Tool, a decision support system mainly structured on the ZAPROS method. The case study was applied to the dam Frios project (Ceará, Brazil).