Risk Ranking for Tunnelling Construction Projects in Malaysia

Tunnelling has become a preferred method of construction for road and highway projects in countries with a lot of hilly slope geological conditions such as found in Malaysia. However the construction works of a tunnelling project are usually complicated and costly, which consequently impose great risks to the parties involved. This paper identifies the key significant risks and sub-risks for tunnelling construction projects in Malaysia through a case study. Interview has been used as the solitary means to determine the significant risks from contractor's eleven key project personnel who were directly involved in the tunnelling construction such as consultant, construction manager and tunnel engineers. The importance of the risks identified is then prioritised and ranked via the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)'s pairwise comparison approach to determine their criticality towards a successful delivery of project. As a result, three key risks have been identified as significant for the tunnelling case study project, namely health and safety, cost overrun in construction and time overrun in construction. Two sub-risks each of the latter categories, which are cost underestimation and unforeseen events (cost overrun in construction) as well as plant and machinery failure and delay in material delivery (time overrun in construction), have occupied the top five overall risk ranking.