Research Of Contract Selection For International Project Owners Based On Comparison Of Contract System

Contract is the mainline of Project Management, the guidebook for conducting project, and the legal ground for determining responsibility,rights and benefit between the owner and the contractor. So they all attach great importance to the signing of contract. Especially in international project, the site may be in any country and the countries of related parties are also uncertain, these factors constitute a serious challenge to the process from contract negotiation to the sign of a contract. .Now the international consultation institutions AIA, JCT, FIDIC, ICE, etc have published a variety of standard contract format. Owners need to consider choosing an appropriate contract to solve this problem. The rapid development of economic globalization and the height prosperity of international construction market further highlight the urgency to solve this problem.On the background, this paper conducts a study on the international engineering contract selection from the angle of owners and established a matrix contract choice model. The transverse module of the model is contract type, and longitudinal module is the contract system. The contract types include DBB contract, DB contract, EPC contract, BOT contract, etc, and the contract systems have AIA contract system, JCT contract system, FIDIC contract system, ICE contract system, etc. The uses of model, namely the determining of contract have two ways: transverse choice first and then longitudinal choice or longitudinal choice first and then transverse choice. No matter which way all need to construct the sub-model of contract type selection and the sub-model of contract system selection. The model of contract type selection is built by AHP by choosing some factors that affect contract type selection. The establishment of the contract system selection model is based on the key variables of comparative analysis of contract systems in chapter 2.This paper makes a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the international main contract systems such as JCT, AIA and FIDIC,then selects three aspects which owners focus on seriously, that is contract price and payment, risk sharing, claims and dispute settlement,and then conducts comparative analysis to terms of corresponding contract of each contract system under the same contract type in chapter 2.Finally this paper chooses a project case of one port wharf to verify the model of contract selection, and the analytical results obtained are complied with actual situation. They show that model of this paper is operable,and can provide guidance and reference for the contract selection of owners in engineering practice.