Conflicting Factors in Korean Construction Industry

Change is inevitable and is a reality of construction projects. Most construction contracts include change clauses and allowing contractors an equitable adjustment to the contract price and duration caused by change. However, the actions of a contractor can cause a loss of productivity and furthermore can result in disruption of the whole project because of a cumulative or ripple effect. Because of its complicated nature, it becomes a complex issue to determine the cumulative impact (ripple effect) caused by single or multiple change orders. Furthermore, owners and contractors do not always agree on the adjusted contract price for the cumulative impact of the changes. A number of studies have attempted to quantify the impact of change orders on project costs and schedule. Many of these attempted to develop regression models to quantify the loss. However, regression analysis has shortcomings in dealing with many qualitative or noisy input data. This study develops ANN models to classify and quantify the labor productivity losses that are caused by the cumulative impact of change orders. The results show that ANN models give significantly improved performance compared to traditional statistical models.