Research On Project Transacti On Opportunity Decision-Making Of General Contracting Enterprises Under The Mode Of General Contracting

In recent years,stepped-up efforts have been made to promote Engineering,Procurement and Construction(EPC)in China’s construction industry.With the increase in promotion,the advantages of EPC have been apparent and recognized in the construction industry.Thus in the next few years,EPC will certainly replace the previous forms as the mainstream form of contracting arrangement in China’s construction industry.A contractor using EPC spends more on construction bidding than using the traditional forms,and a fixed-price contract is usually used for an EPC project,resulting in the contractor having difficulty demanding compensation while bearing most of the risk during contract execution.As a result,a research on how EPC contractors should select projects in order to avoid loss caused by irrational bidding is of great help to EPC contractors.This paper studies the theories of linguistic multi-attribute group decision-making,artificial intelligence and big data that are related to the characteristics of the decision-making on project selection for EPC contractors,and builds indexes in decision-making on project selection for current EPC contractors in China based on the analysis of the current EPC form in China’s construction industry,market environment of the industry,EPC projects and the characteristics of EPC contractors.Our analysis found that these indexes in decision-making are mostly qualitative and dynamic;therefore,we proposed a new two-phase method for decision-making which is divided into primary decision-making and final decision-making,and separates qualitative indexes and quantitative ones.In the phase of primary decision-making,the indexes that affect primary decision-making are mostly dynamic;the indexes themselves and how much they affect primary decisionmaking vary by owners,characteristics of projects and types of bidding,so there is no standard and analysis should be made on a case-by-case basis.Therefore,we built a primary decisionmaking on project selection model based on the theory of linguistic multi-attribute group decision-making and presented its characteristics and how it makes a decision.This model adapts to the mostly qualitative and dynamic indexes and is able to make accurate and quick evaluation,which facilitates contractors’ primary choice among project opportunities.For the phase of final decision-making,we analyzed a number of cases of completed EPC projects in Guangxi,China collected from various sources,and performed feature extraction from these cases.We built a Decision Support System with Case-based Reasoning for EPC Contractors using the technique of artificial intelligence case-based reasoning and the open source tool myCBR which is developed by German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence.After a primary decision is made,the System allows users to retrieve similar project cases,forecast the profit margin of projects based on the information of these similar projects before making a final decision.Finally,we applied our two-phase method that uses both linguistic multi-attribute group decision-making and case-based reasoning to the decision-making on project selection by a company.The results of application prove that our method is reliable and can be used by EPC contractors in making decisions on which construction project to choose.