Schemes Comparison And Selection Method For Important Engineering Change Based On Value Engineering

Engineering change management and control is a key part of the contract management in a construction project, it affects the schedule, quality, safety, and cost of the project. Nowadays, the cost introduced by engineering changes keeps expanding and it is taking a larger portion of the overall cost of a construction project. The management and control of the engineering changes and the comparison and selection of schemes for engineering changes are the keys to oversee the investment and improve the efficiency of a construction project, especially when facing an important engineering change.A value engineering based mathematical model for comparing and selecting the schemes for engineering change is proposed in this paper. The engineering change decision obtained from the proposed method is accessed by the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. The evaluation result shows that the engineering change decision reflects the economic effects objectively and comprehensively.In this paper, the proposed mathematical model is applied to two typical engineering changes-(i) the change of foundation pit support, and (ii) the addition of an indoor heated swimming pool-occurred in a construction of a research and development training center in Shenzhen. The comparison and selection of schemes for the engineering changes are carried out using the following six key metrics:quality, duration, function, process, safety, and finance. The weighting of these metrics is computed by the0-1scoring method and a score is calculated for each of the potential implementation plans. A engineering change decision is then resulted by comparing the score of implementation plans. Note, the contrast analysis of with and without is applied to the swimming pool engineering change at the beginning of the process in order to obtain a scientific and reasonable decision.