A View from the Bottom: Project-Oriented Risk Mining Approach for Overseas Construction Projects

Analysis of construction tender documents in overseas projects is a very important issue from a risk management point of view. Unfortunately, majority of construction firms are biased by winning contracts without in-depth analysis of tender documents. As a result, many contractors have incurred loss in overseas projects. Although a lot of risk analysis techniques have been introduced, most of them focus project's external unexpected risks such as country conditions and owner's financial standing. However, because those external risks are difficult to control and take preemptive action, we need to concentrate on project inherent risks. Based on this premise, this paper proposes a project-oriented risk mining approach which could detect and extract project risk factors automatically before they are materialized and assess them. This study presents a methodology regarding how to extract potential risks which exist in owner's project requirements and project tender documents using state of the art data analysis method such as text mining, data mining, and information visualization. The project-oriented risk mining approach is expected to effectively reflect project characteristics to the project risk management and could provide construction firms with valuable business intelligence.