A.H. BOUSSABAINE, R. THOMAS and T.M.S. ELHAG
This paper furthers work that already exists in the use of artificial intelligence techniques to forecast cost flow for construction projects. The paper explains the need for…
Abstract
This paper furthers work that already exists in the use of artificial intelligence techniques to forecast cost flow for construction projects. The paper explains the need for cost‐flow forecasting and investigates the methods currently used to perform such a task. It introduces neural networks as an alternative approach to the existing methods. The relationship between the number of nodes used and the accuracy of the neural network in modelling the cost flow is closely examined. From this research an optimal solution is proposed for the case and a prototype system is developed. The results of the investigation of the number of nodes used and testing of the prototype neural network for sample cases are presented and discussed.
Ernest Kissi, Theophilus Adjei-Kumi, Edward Badu and Emmanuel Bannor Boateng
Tender price remains an imperative parameter for clients in deciding whether to invest in a construction project, and it serves as a basis for tender price index (TPI…
Abstract
Purpose
Tender price remains an imperative parameter for clients in deciding whether to invest in a construction project, and it serves as a basis for tender price index (TPI) manipulations. This paper aims to examine the factors affecting tender price in the construction industry.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the literature review, nine independent constructs and one dependent construct relating to tender pricing were identified. A structured questionnaire survey was conducted among quantity surveyors in Ghana. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) examined the influences of various constructs on tender price development (TPD) and the relationships among TPD and TPI.
Findings
Results showed that cultural attributes, client attributes, contractor attributes; contract procedures and procurement methods; consultant and design team; external factors and market conditions; project attributes; sustainable and technological attributes; and TPI have a positive influence on tender price, whereas fraudulent attributes exert a negative influence.
Practical implications
The findings offer construction professionals broader understanding of factors that affect tender pricing. The results may be used in professional decision-making in the pricing of construction projects, as they offer clearer causal relations between how each construct will influence pricing.
Originality/value
This study adds to the body of construction pricing knowledge by establishing the relationships and degree of influences of various factors on tender price. These findings provide a valuable reference for practitioners.
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Rojas-Trejos Carlos Alberto and González-Velasco Julián
Waste production is one of the most important problems that humankind faces. Human-based activities generate diverse waste types that have to be treated and disposed differently…
Abstract
Waste production is one of the most important problems that humankind faces. Human-based activities generate diverse waste types that have to be treated and disposed differently. This results in the need to build more facilities to manage the waste and to avoid further environmental damage. Colombia established a successful policy to close open dumps and to control pollution. Notwithstanding the advances that have been made in final disposal, it is necessary to extend the life of the final disposal sites and increase the closure of open landfills. Valle del Cauca is the third most populated Colombian province, and it is also considered the third province that generates more waste. This chapter addresses the problem of locating solid waste disposal centers in Valle del Cauca by applying the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with fuzzy logic, a multicriteria method that compares opinions of a decision-making group. Additionally, each potential location area is characterized by considering industrial and environmental issues, societal dynamics, infrastructure and topography, costs, and taxes. After applying a variant of AHP, the decision-making group was able to find that Jamundi is the best location to open the disposal center. The method shows strong potential to identify and prioritize alternative locations for a diverse group of stakeholders. Most importantly, the methodology lets us structure better qualitative and quantitative data, as well as to link multiple levels to avoid choosing locations that will affect society, environment, and other stakeholders, without considering the trade-offs among diverse criteria considering benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks (BOCR).
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Grey target decision making is one of the important problems of decision-making theory. It is critical to express uncertain information effectively and depose them in a reasonable…
Abstract
Purpose
Grey target decision making is one of the important problems of decision-making theory. It is critical to express uncertain information effectively and depose them in a reasonable and simple way. The purpose of this paper is to solve the grey target problem by the grey potential degree method without whiten value and without distribution function. Furthermore, this new approach has an advantage of realizing both comparing and standardization work during the process of treating the data.
Design/methodology/approach
First, this paper makes a brief overview of the existing method for grey target decision. Then, the conception of a grey potential degree system is introduced and the conception of standard grey potential degree is build up, and a new grey potential-based method based on the grey target multiple attribute decision method is proposed. At the same time, the standard grey potential and its application in multiple resource data are studied.
Findings
At the same time the standard grey potential and its application in multiple resource data are studied. Standard grey potential is presented by means of three examples together with the comparison with the existing method to demonstrate that the grey potential-based method could be used to solve the problem of grey target decision conveniently and effectively.
Originality/value
It is very important to compare grey numbers to obtain scientific and reasonable results for a grey target decision-making problem. However, in the actual application of grey numbers, it is difficult to find out the probability density function or the whiten function of grey numbers. When grey numbers are compared and deposed through the whiten value, much information regarding grey numbers will be lost and, at the same time, the value of grey numbers in uncertainty is partly lost. The method discussed in this paper is reasonable and feasible.
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Mohammed A. Al-Sharafi, Noor Al-Qaysi, Noorminshah A. Iahad and Mostafa Al-Emran
While there is an abundant amount of literature studies on mobile payment adoption, there is a scarce of knowledge concerning the sustainable use of mobile payment contactless…
Abstract
Purpose
While there is an abundant amount of literature studies on mobile payment adoption, there is a scarce of knowledge concerning the sustainable use of mobile payment contactless technologies. As those technologies are mainly concerned with security and users' trust, the question of how security factors and trust can influence the sustainable use of those technologies within and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic is still unanswered. This research thus develops a theoretical model based on integrating the protection motivation theory (PMT) and the expectation-confirmation model (ECM), extended with perceived trust (PT) to explore the sustainable use of mobile payment contactless technologies.
Design/methodology/approach
The developed model is evaluated based on data collected through a web-based survey from 523 users who used contactless payment technologies. Unlike the existing literature, the collected data were analyzed using a hybrid structural equation modeling-artificial neural network (SEM-ANN) technique.
Findings
The data analysis results reinforced all the proposed relationships in the developed model. The sensitivity analysis results showed that PT has the largest impact on the sustainable use of mobile payment contactless technologies with 97.2% normalized importance, followed by self-efficacy (SE) (77%), satisfaction (72.1%), perceived vulnerability (PV) (48.9%), perceived usefulness (PU) (48.2%), perceived severity (PS) (40.7%), response efficacy (RE) (28.7%) and response costs (RCs) (24.1%).
Originality/value
The originality of this research lies behind the development of an integrated model based on PMT and ECM to understand the sustainable use of mobile payment contactless technologies. The study provides several managerial implications for decision-makers, policy-makers and service providers to ensure the sustainability of those contactless technologies within and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Muhammad T. Hatamleh, Mohammed Hiyassat, Ghaleb Jalil Sweis and Rateb Jalil Sweis
Cost estimating process is an important element within the project life cycle. Comprehensive information, expanded knowledge, considerable expertise, and continuous improvement…
Abstract
Purpose
Cost estimating process is an important element within the project life cycle. Comprehensive information, expanded knowledge, considerable expertise, and continuous improvement are needed to obtain accurate cost estimation. The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical factors that affect accuracy of cost estimation and evaluate the degree to which these factors are important from contractors’ and consultants’ viewpoints.
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative and quantitative research approaches were adopted in collecting and analyzing the data, and testing the hypotheses. Based on the literature review, a questionnaire was prepared and then was modified according to the results of face-to-face open-ended interviews conducted with 11 project managers. The final version of the questionnaire was distributed to a random sample of 265 respondents. For analyzing the collected data Kendall’s and Mann-Whitney tests were conducted.
Findings
The analysis revealed that there is a strong agreement between contractors and consultants in the ranking of the factors related to consultant, contractor, design parameters, and information. A slightly weak agreement between contractors and consultants was noted regarding the factors related to market conditions (external factors) and factors related to project characteristics. Furthermore, the results show that the top ten factors affecting the accuracy of cost estimate are clear and detail drawings and specification, pricing experience of construction projects, perception of estimation importance, equipment (cost/availability/performance), project complexity, clear scope definition, accuracy and reliability of cost information, site constraints (access, storage, services), material availability, financial capabilities of the client, and availability of database of bids on similar project (historical data).
Originality/value
Offers an original view of the concept of accuracy of cost estimates as it relates to the efficiency of the project relying on both literature review and empirical evidence.
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Peter Wanke, Jorge Junio Moreira Antunes, Antônio L. L. Filgueira, Flavia Michelotto, Isadora G. E. Tardin and Yong Tan
This paper aims to investigate the performance of OECD countries' long-term productivity during the period of 1975–2018.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the performance of OECD countries' long-term productivity during the period of 1975–2018.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employed different approaches to evaluate how efficiency scores vary with changes in inputs and outputs: Data Envelopment Analysis (CRS, VRS and FDH), TOPSIS and TOPSIS of these scores.
Findings
The findings suggest that, during the period of this study, countries with higher freedom of religion and with Presidential democracy regimes are positively associated with higher productivity.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that uses efficiency models to assess the productivity levels of OECD countries based on several contextual variables that can potentially affect it.
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Isaac Mensah, Theophilus Adjei-Kumi and Gabriel Nani
Determining the duration for road construction projects represents a problem for construction professionals in Ghana. The purpose of this paper is to develop an artificial neural…
Abstract
Purpose
Determining the duration for road construction projects represents a problem for construction professionals in Ghana. The purpose of this paper is to develop an artificial neural network (ANN) model for determining the duration for rural bituminous surfaced road projects.
Design/methodology/approach
Data for 22 completed bituminous surfaced road projects from the Department of Feeder Roads (rural road agency) were collected and analyzed using the principal component analysis (PCA) and ANN techniques. The data collected were final payment certificates which contained payment bill of quantities (BOQ) of work items executed for the selected completed road projects. The executed quantities in the BOQ were the total quantities of work items for site clearance, earthworks, in-situ concrete, reinforcement, formwork, gravel sub-base/base, bitumen, road line markings and furniture, length of road and actual durations for each of the completed projects. The PCA was first employed to reduce the data in order to identify a smaller number of variables (or significant quantities) that constitute 81.58 percent of the total variance of the collected data. The ANN was then used to develop the network using the identified significant quantities as input variables and the actual durations as output variables.
Findings
The coefficient of correlation (R) and determination (R2) as well as the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) obtained show that construction professionals can use the developed ANN model for determining duration. The study shows that the best neural network is the multi-layer perceptron with a structure 3-38-1 based on a back propagation feed forward algorithm. The developed network produces good results with an MAPE of 17.56 percent or an average accuracy of 82.44 percent.
Research limitations/implications
Apart from the fact that the sample size was small, the developed model does not incorporate the implications of other likely factors that may affect contract duration.
Practical implications
The outcome of this study is to help construction professionals to fix realistic contract duration for road construction projects before signing a contract. Such realistic contract duration would help reduce time overruns as well as the payment of liquidated and ascertained damages by contractors for late completion.
Originality/value
This paper proposes an alternative way of determining the duration for road construction projects using the total quantities of work items in a final payment BOQ. The approach is based on the PCA and ANN model of quantities of work items of completed road projects.
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Hassan Ali, Jingwen Zhang, Sheng Liu and Muhammad Shoaib
Due to the fierce market competition, many organizations seek global suppliers because of lower procurement costs and better product quality. However, selecting suitable global…
Abstract
Purpose
Due to the fierce market competition, many organizations seek global suppliers because of lower procurement costs and better product quality. However, selecting suitable global suppliers is one of the complicated decision-making tasks for decision-makers due to the involvement of various qualitative and quantitative factors. The primary purpose of this research is to design an integrated approach for global supplier selection and order allocation in the context of developing an environment-friendly supply chain under data uncertainty.
Design/methodology/approach
Initially, the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) is used to calculate the selected criteria weights. After that, the weights obtained from FAHP are inserted into the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) to examine the performance of selected suppliers and determine their final ranks. Finally, the obtained results from FTOPSIS are incorporated into the multi-choice goal programming (MCGP) model, which involves multi-aspiration levels to allocate the optimal order quantity to the selected global suppliers.
Findings
A real-time case study of the automotive industry is presented to demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of the suggested approach. The case study and sensitivity analysis results show that the proposed model effectively tackles suppliers' evaluation and order allocation data uncertainty.
Originality/value
Incorporation of risks, environmental management and economic factors during global supplier selection in the automotive sector has not been given much attention in the past literature. So, this research aims to fulfill the gap by developing an integrated approach that can tackle data uncertainty effectively.