Creating technical criteria for the hierarchization of public works: Case study in Paraná state, Brazil

Public works in general play an important role because of their expressive value and considerable social relevance. In this respect, it is necessary to establish criteria/indicators for defining the hierarchy of works that must be conducted by a public entity, mainly for works considered ordinary, that is, those that do not stand out from a set of alternatives by degree of emergency or importance. Specifically, the hierarchization of engineering works to be carried out by the Public Administration in Brazil usually adopts the political approach to decision making without the application of rational technical criteria. Therefore, the aim of this article is to present a methodology to define the hierarchy of engineering works with the judiciary branch of power through the creation of technical criteria/indicators, followed by the application of the Fuzzy-Delphi technique to define the indices/weights that comprise the indicators. The technical criteria were created based on Resolution 114 of the country's National Council of Justice (Conselho Nacional de Justiça; CNJ), whose weights were obtained through the aforementioned method, which was applied to a panel of experts, in two stages, with the adoption of triangular fuzzy numbers. The results, which were clear and objective, provide the General Hierarchization Index (GHI), with the ordering/ranking of the works included in the process. The methodology was validated in a case study applied to 162 alternatives (districts), containing 192 buildings of the Court of Justice of Paraná State (Tribunal de Justiça do Paraná; TJPR), proving to be an important tool to support decision making. The optimization of resources through the determination of priorities converges to the sustainable hiring applied to public contracts. Institutions of the other Powers of the Republic could and should also be encouraged by public authorities to conduct technical studies similar to the proposal presented here, always clarifying the need for a clear and objective definition of the criteria and weights to be applied in the development of solutions for multicriteria decision making.