ABSTRACT
Civil engineers deal with three main tasks during their career: analysis, design and construction. When analysing, engineers are commonly required to verify and suggest means to comply with regulations or ways to improve the performance of a system, and, in doing so, they seek to achieve performance goals. In designing, engineers face the need to create built environment, and this typically results in conflicting objectives of professionalism, developer’s interests and resources. Finally, during construction, an engineer faces the need to allocate labour, equipment and materials to reach given milestones on time. However, timely achievement of such deadlines requiresmore intensive use of the resourcesmentionedwhich triggers project cost. Hence, the engineer is faced with two common conflicting goals: minimization of resource utilization and achievement of a certain level of quality and/or performance.
