Risk Cost Measurement of Value for Money Evaluation Based on Case-Based Reasoning and Ontology: A Case Study of the Urban Rail Transit Public-Private Partnership Projects in China

Hongqiang Wang, Qiaoyan Lin and Yingjie Zhang
Additional contact information
Hongqiang Wang: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Qiaoyan Lin: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Yingjie Zhang: School of Management, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 200093, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-22

Abstract: Risk is demonstrated as one of the most crucial drivers of value for money (VFM) in public–private partnerships (PPP), but in previous studies, the risk cost estimation of the quantitative evaluation of VFM was still a dilemma that strongly depended on specialist discretion or had low methodological operability. This paper establishes a prediction model for estimating the risk cost in the phase of VFM evaluation through a combination of case-based reasoning (CBR) and ontology technology. PPP information ontology was established to provide the technical basis of knowledge representation for the CBR cycle. Then, according to whether the information data were quantitative or qualitative, similarity calculation methods were used for the retrieval of similar cases. The conceptual semantic similarity algorithm based on the ontology tree structure was well implemented to compare abstract information. After the most similar cases were extracted, a revision mechanism was followed when there were deviations in the similar cases. Finally, the risk costs of the target case were obtained by weighting the extracted similar cases based on the similarity. An empirical analysis was performed with 18 historical projects from the China Public–Private Partnerships Center. The results showed that the relative errors between the estimated and actual costs of total risk and retained risk were 11.05% and 2.41%, respectively. This indicates that the estimation model could achieve a better risk cost prediction with small errors, which validates the availability of the model. Based on the proposed model, this research establishes an extensible PPP information ontology model. It promotes the integration and interoperability of information knowledge in the PPP domain, which can be further expanded according to the requirements. Coherent accuracy is provided by the whole CBR-based measurement process, which has offered a systematic and objective method for the risk costs measurement of PPP projects.

Keywords: public–private partnerships; risk cost; case-based reasoning; ontology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/9/5547/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/9/5547/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:9:p:5547-:d:808866

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().