Negotiation-based decision support model for utility relocations in transportation infrastructure projects

Carlos Caldas, Chien-Cheng Chou and Jim O'connor

Construction Management and Economics, 2008, vol. 26, issue 10, 1079-1090

Abstract: Highway projects in metropolitan areas often require that adjacent utilities be relocated to accommodate new or expanded highway facilities. Traditionally, utility owners have been responsible for their own relocations prior to highway construction. However, utility relocation delay was reported as one of the root causes of overall project delays in highway construction. In the USA, one strategic approach sporadically taken over the past 15 years by some state departments of transportation (DOTs) has been to combine utility relocation work with the highway contractor's scope of work. While the combined strategy offers many benefits, it does have its own set of challenges and disadvantages. Many of these difficulties involve disagreements between DOTs and utility owners over the appropriateness of the combined strategy for particular types of relocations. Hence, a negotiation-based decision support model (DSM) for determining whether to use the combined strategy was developed to provide guidance to both DOTs and utility decision makers during the planning and design phases of highways. A literature review and interviews with experts from both DOTs and the utility industry were conducted to identify significant factors as well as their impact levels on the decision. A DSM aiming at synthesizing the factors and orchestrating the negotiation process for the decision was proposed and verified. As suggested by the model evaluators, the proposed DSM can improve the quality of this complex decision-making process, especially for less experienced project managers or designers.

Keywords: Decision support systems; utilities; highway transportation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01446190802331388 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:conmgt:v:26:y:2008:i:10:p:1079-1090

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCME20

DOI: 10.1080/01446190802331388

Access Statistics for this article

Construction Management and Economics is currently edited by Will Hughes

More articles in Construction Management and Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().