Decision-support modelling tool for contractor-to-project assignment and project management

Abstract A project’s success or failure can be attributed to various management factors, including consistency or discrepancy in decision-making. The degree of inconsistency, lack of expertise, comprehension, or ignorance in some cases are just a few of the many variables that might impact the process’s consistency and result in poor decision-making. Techniques have been developed to aid in consistent decision-making, but the selection process became extensive and disallowed wide adoption of such techniques in construction and project management practice. As such, a project-to-contractor assignment problem is one of the important areas in which a slight mistake leads to notable losses. Therefore, there is a need for better decision-support tool development. This study introduces Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)-based development and application of a management science technique along with game-theoretic modelling to develop a decision-support tool, successful project management (SPM), to assess and lessen the impact of human inconsistency on construction projects to contractor assignment and management decision-making. It is demonstrated that contractor preferences can be used to assign projects to contractors. The developed method significantly reduces managers’ effort to make informed decisions for successful project completion. Case studies are presented to demonstrate the improvement in AHP and efficiency of the proposed method, along with precise results and comparisons for the effort one would need to complete the process successfully. Sample problems demonstrate the use of traditional AHP and then the application of the proposed technique to highlight the improvement. As demonstrated, time savings to arrive at consistent decisions are multi-fold.