EXPERT SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT FOR EVALUATING COMPETITION ABILITY OF EGYPTIAN CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES IN INFRASTRUCTURE TENDERS

This study attempts to shed a great deal of light on the problem of contractor selection in the Egyptian infrastructure projects. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the available literature on contractor selection methods. Reviewing the literature we found that there are thirteen criteria that must be taken into consideration when evaluating the competition ability (i) Financial ; (ii) Health and Safety ;(iii) Technical; ;(iv) Quality;(v) Organization ;(vi) Relationship ;(vii) Past Experience ;(viii) Past Performance ;(ix) Resources ;(x) Environmental ;(xi) Management ; (xii) Present workload ;( (xiii) Tendering price. The thirteen criteria have twenty seven sub-criteria that are collected from previous studies that influence the competition ability. The objective of this research is to study the contractor selection process and to develop an expert system that aids in assessing contractor selection in infrastructure tenders in Egypt. Interviews with domain experts were arranged. The results of questionnaire surveys have been analyzed in order to extract the knowledge which subsequently used to develop the expert system for tenders` evaluation (ES-TE). The system was tested against three actual cases and it is found that the system is valid for assessing the contractor selection in infrastructure tenders in Egypt. Finally, the expert program facilitates contractor selection instead of human judgment.