Study On Conflict Resolving System Of Partnering In Construction Projects

As the globalization of the construction industry, the construction market is getting more and more competitive, and nowadays conflicts are always getting more enforced. In order to effectively improve the relationship between each party engaged, and build an environment of mutual trust and one with the goal of "multi-win", in the 1980s, a new model of engineering project management was first proposed and developed in the USA, which was called "partnering". Thereafter, this model has been widely applied in many countries or areas, such as the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. "Partnering" has been proved to have the ability of better control in engineering project qualities, costs and schedules, and has reduced the number of occurrences of conflicts and dispute greatly.The success of partnering benefits not only from team cooperation, mutual communication and the creation the idea of "multi-win", but also the effective conflict resolving mechanism. This thesis uses the idea of conflict management theories and conflict resolving techniques in manufacturing for reference and studies, theoretically and practically, the conflict resolving system in partnering.Firstly, this thesis analyses, with the theory of conflict management, the main reasons of the occurrences of conflicts in construction projects using partnering, summarizes the dynamic process of the development of conflicts. Secondly, using the idea of computer-aided real-time control in the manufacturing industry, considering the characteristics in the construction industry, this thesis proposes a mainframe of a novel conflict resolving system, including the monitoring, processing and serving modules. The resolving system involves a normal conflict resolving process based on computer and network technologies, a conflict resolving process based on partnering workshops, and an urgent process. These three processes are hierarchically constructed, in order to resolve conflicts with different priorities with different processes. Besides, other conflict management methods such as partnering networks, conflict resolution database, and "shadow partner" are also suggested. After that, the four steps of the operation process are described: the construction of the system, the recognition of conflicts, the analysisand resolving of conflicts, learning and feedback. At last, a case study is introduced, with the comparison of the proposed conflict resolving system and the conflict resolution-dispute procedure recommended by AGC, and the pros and cons of the conflict resolving system are brought out, with the suggestion of future improvements.