Design Change Risk Management Of Foreign EPC Projects Base On ISM And Multi-agent Simulation

With the introduction of the "One Belt,One Road" initiative and the implementation of the "Go Global" strategy,more and more enterprises have gone abroad to undertake foreign-related projects.At present,most of the foreign-related projects have adopted the EPC mode,and design plays a leading role as the "leader" of the EPC mode,directly affecting the cost and duration of the project.Due to the lack of attention to the risk management of design changes,and the large scale and long construction period of foreign-related EPC projects,affected by the complex changes in the international environment,once the design problems will cause rework,cross-border re-procurement of equipment and other problems,affecting the effectiveness of the project.When faced with the risk of design change on a project,managers were often unable to identify the most fundamental risk factors due to the complex relationships between them,and were therefore unable to propose effective measures,resulting in inefficient risk management.Due to the uniqueness of the project itself,it is impossible to determine whether the same risk response measures can be applied to different projects to prevent risk.In this paper,a list of risk factors has been established through literature survey and entropy method,risk relationship chain has been established based on ISM model to explore the influence path between factors,source risk factors have been identified,measures have been proposed,the effectiveness of measures has been tested based on Multi-Agent simulation modelling,and to improve the efficiency of risk management,a risk management visualization software for design changes in foreign EPC projects has been designed and developed.To improve the efficiency of risk management,a design change risk management visualization software has been designed and developed.It helps to anticipate possible risks and corresponding preventive measures for projects that have not yet started or are in progress,and to summarize risk management experience for completed projects.The main research elements of this paper have been as follows.(1)From the three stages of design,procurement and construction,the risk of design changes in foreign-related EPC projects has been analyzed to determine the direction of risk identification,and 56 risk factors that may affect design changes in foreign-related EPC projects have been proposed from the four dimensions of design stage,procurement stage,construction stage and the whole process through literature survey,and a preliminary list of risk factors has been established.(2)The risk factors have been adjusted to forty-five through a pre-survey as a criterion for a formal questionnaire survey.The entropy weighting method has been used to calculate the weight of each factor and the top 50% of factors under each dimension were obtained as key risk factors,nine in the design phase,five in the procurement phase,three in the construction phase and six in the whole process for a total of twenty-three.(3)According to the risk analysis results obtained by the ISM method,risk factors are divided into three levels: direct,indirect and source,of which there have been three direct risk factors,fourteen indirect risk factors and six source risk factors.Risk relationship chains G1,G2 and G3 were established based on the influence paths between the risk factors,which were used to further propose risk response measures.(4)A model has been developed to test the effectiveness of the risk response measures by simulating the changes in the whole project process before and after the implementation of the risk response measures through Multi-Agent using Simulink simulation platform,and by comparing the changes in project cost,duration and probability of risk occurrence.(5)In order to improve the efficiency of risk management,the risk management visualization software for design changes in foreign EPC projects has been developed using Matlab,including four main interfaces for risk identification,risk analysis,risk response and verification of the effectiveness of risk response measures to realize the entire process of project risk management.(6)Taking the risk events of the three engineering cases as the research objects,the previously proposed risk management method for design changes in foreign EPC projects has been applied to analyse the risk factors existing in the projects and the influence paths between each factor,and then match the corresponding risk relationship chains G1,G2 and G3 respectively,find the source risk factors,select the corresponding risk countermeasures and conduct utility tests,and conclude that the risk countermeasures are effective.