Fuzzy model to predict amount of delay in the construction of public universities projects

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the largest developing counties at the current time. Currently, a huge public construction work is running in the kingdom. It was observed that many of public construction projects are exposed to extensive delays especially in public universities construction projects. These delays will affect greatly the educational sector through: 1) Loss of benefits for all stakeholders, 2) Decrease of quality due to rapid execution in construction to recover the delayed time, 3) Delay of the start of related projects, and 4) Increase of claims and disputes between project parties. The main objectives of this research is to identify the main delay causes in public universities construction projects and to develop a fuzzy system to estimate the expected percentage of delay in the construction of public universities projects. This system will enable project owner and contractor to estimate the percentage of delay based on assumed construction related circumstances. The proposed system is implemented using MATLAB software. The research methodology will include identification of the most critical causes of delays through literature review and by conducting Delphi Technique with the help of a selected panel of domain experts. The main concept of Delphi technique is to achieve an agreement in different opinion of experts that will facilitate the determination of critical causes. Twelve critical causes of delay were identified. Those critical causes are used as input variables for the fuzzy system. Each critical cause will be identified in the form of membership functions. The relations between the critical causes are built by using a set of if then Rule. The proposed systemis validated using 14 actual cases collected from king Abdulaziz University and Taibah University projects. The validation results were satisfactory.