Ng, S T and Li, W (2004) A multiagent system for negotiating construction bidding decisions. In: Khosrowshahi, F (ed.) Proceedings of 20th Annual ARCOM Conference, 1-3 September 2004, Edinburgh, UK.
Abstract
Competitive bidding is the most commonly adopted method to determine which contracting firm to be awarded a construction project. Depending upon the market condition and their existing workload, a contractor would have to make decisions on (i) bid or no bid; (ii) direct and indirect costs; and (iii) mark-up level. With the reliance on subcontracting system and the amount of materials involved in a construction project, decisions on the three crucial steps mentioned above cannot be made without first consulting and negotiating with the relevant S/Cs and suppliers. The problem is aggravated when various in-house departments participated in the decision making process. Careful negotiation on time, cost, resource allocation, quality standard, and so on during the bidding stage would, therefore, be paramount important as this could reduce the likelihood of disputes and project failure. Unfortunately, the negotiation process is normally carried out in a manual and unstructured manner. In an absence of time for thorough negotiation during the bidding stage, the results could be far from ideal. In this paper, The Multi-Agent System (MAS) approaches are applied to model the negotiation process during the bidding stage. The model (i) analyses the characteristics of negotiation at this process; (ii) identifies suitable problem to be solved; and (iii) selects the appropriate negotiation mechanisms for solving those problems. It is envisaged that, by adopting this distributed coordination methodology, the response time could be much reduced while the expected profit could be maximized.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | multi-agent system; bidding decision; negotiation mechanism; construction management |
| Index terms: | subcontracting system, negotiating, multi-agent system, construction project, methodology, bidding, coordination, negotiation, competitive bidding, project failure, quality standard, indirect cost, mark-up, resource allocation, profit, workload, dispute, decision-making process, market condition |
| Subjects: | production management, management, research methods, quality assurance, cost management, price determination, conflict resolution, decision analysis, economic and policy analysis, dispute resolution, organization, project completion, artificial intelligence, bidding, economic analysis, resource management |
| Topics: | Risk Management, Stakeholder Management, Procurement, Business Strategy, Research Practice, Project Management, Organizational Design, Site Management, Legal Issues, Digital Applications, Quality Management, Human Resources, Supply Chain Management |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCT |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here