Causes of Change Orders and Its Impact on Road Maintenance Contracts

.................................................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ............................................................................................................. iv LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................................ xi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1 1.1. Change Orders Quantification .......................................................................................... 2 1.2. Causes of Change Orders ................................................................................................. 4 1.3. Contingency Estimations.................................................................................................. 5 1.4. Schedule Crashing Optimization ...................................................................................... 6 1.5. Objectives ......................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................................. 9 2.1. Change Orders in Maintenance Contracts ........................................................................ 9 2.2. Delphi Study ................................................................................................................... 12 2.3. Causes of Change Orders ............................................................................................... 14 2.4. Estimations of Contingencies ......................................................................................... 18 2.5. Optimizations for Schedule Crashing ............................................................................ 21 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY .......................................................................................... 26 3.1. Quantification of the Change Orders ............................................................................. 28 3.2. Analysis of Causes and Preventive Measures of Change Orders................................... 30 3.3. The ‘neuralnet’ Package in the R-program .................................................................... 33 3.4. Development of a Contingency Estimation Tool ........................................................... 40