Innovative Construction Procurement Selection through an Artificial Intelligence Approach

The construction industry in the British Isles has long been accused of being low tech, averse to funding research and development, and reliant on other sectors allied to construction for innovative improvements. One area has been championed as reflecting change, especially post Latham and Egan, and that is construction procurement. The last few decades have witnessed a proliferation of procurement systems and sub-systems. The methodology herein proposes to customise and innovate bespoke construction project procurement strategies through the development of an intelligent system and to discover if the new procurement methods are indeed innovative. The approach has three main phases; firstly the planning and development phase, followed by the empirical phase and thirdly; the final quasiexperimental phase. After a detailed literature review in the planning stage, the empirical phase includes a pilot survey to ascertain the precise nature of innovation within building procurement in the British Isles and establish an appropriate knowledge acquisition model. This model will be utilised within the main survey to populate a database of relevant innovative procurement case histories. In the final quasi-experimental phase; a fuzzy hierarchical case-based reasoning (CBR) platform will be software engineered as an innovative procurement selection mechanism. This will be validated and verified through a Delphi process to ascertain its effectiveness and appropriateness. The outputted fuzzy hierarchical CBR mechanism will be beneficial to the construction professional seeking innovative procurement selection ideas in the strategy and consultation stages of a building project.