Background and objective: Excavation projects have many economic, social and environmental consequences due to the importance and complexity of the operation and the lack of suitable legal structures for controlling such projects. The lack of proper implementation of such projects annually has resulted in many human and financial damages due to the collapse of the projects. By investigating the occurrence of constructional incidents over the past decade, the excavation phase has caused the most damages to the project. This has made it very important to consider the safety, technical, and operational risks of these projects.

Method: This study tries to optimize and prioritize the risk considering the applied methods in excavation and identifying and studying the risks and analyze them using experts’ point of views and multi-criteria decision making method. 

Findings: The main risks involved in excavation projects related to the soil condition, dynamic loads around the excavation and the inherent stability of the neighborhoods. Several studies have shown that neglecting condition of soil and surrounding environments have a significant impact on incidents and reduce safety in excavation projects, which leads to significant human and financial losses.

Results: Considering the involved risks that each of them may cause unwanted costs to project managers, there are different weights for all various risks which magnitude of each weight indicates its high importance. The higher the weight of each risk is the greater the consequences of the incident and the higher costs to the project managers. Therefore, an appropriate prioritization can be made for allocating budget for the safety of projects, taking into account their cost-effectiveness.