Assessing construction workforce diversity of skills and education with the probabilistic linguistic fuzzy Petri net

Workforce diversity has impacts on the performance and productivity of construction projects. While the attributes of workforce diversity have been researched, few existing studies evaluate the negative workforce diversity factors, particularly concerning the diversity of ‘skills and education’ in uncertain circumstances. In this study, the failure mode and effect analysis, with the independent relationship of RPN factors (I-FMEA), has been developed to assess the negative diversity factors of ‘skills and education’. In the I-FMEA model, the probability of occurrence (P_O), the negative impact level (N_I), and the degree of risk manageability (M_D) are considered independent for analyzing ‘skills and education’. Secondly, the evaluation information is analyzed with probabilistic linguistic fuzzy Petri nets (PL-FPN). The reasoning rules of the PL-FPN are related to linguistic scales. Finally, a case study of negative diversity factors related to ‘skills and education’ is analyzed with PL-FPN in the I-FMEA model. The apparent advantages of the proposed analytical approach are validated through various comparative analyses, including methods involving reasoning rules, distance-based methods, and the traditional FMEA method.