Decision Support for Bids in Process Plant Engineering

The intensive competition in the international market for plant engineering is characterized by high pricing pressure, increase of local content requirement and decrease of project durations. This leads to intricate logistics problems with regard to production locations and project planning. These interacting decisions are to be considered in the bidding phase of a plant project already. This paper proposes an integrated optimization model to determine the project costs as the lower limit of the bid price. Its application is illustrated by means of a case study.