Contractor selection by using multi-criteria decision-making for Egyptian road maintenance

Abstract

Egypt has witnessed a revolution in all fields and the establishment of giant projects, which require the selection of the appropriate contractor for their implementation. The major factor for evaluating contractors is the tender price of the project. The lowest price is not always a guarantee of the quality or time of a building project. Recently, there has been a shift away from the “lowest-price-wins” concept and a subjective judgment towards multi-criteria decision-making of selecting the project's contractors aiming to help owners in making decisions. The manuscript presents a multi-criteria decision-making strategy to optimize the selection of contractors for construction projects. The calculation of this strategy is divided into two phases. The first phase is designed to identify contractor prequalification criteria and utilize the AHP approach based on current Egyptian practice to calculate their weight. The second phase provides two techniques: (1) technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and (2) vlsekriterijumska optimization I kompromisno resenje (VIKOR) to optimize the selection of the available contractors for construction projects. Contractor 2 has the highest prices and lower values in technical capability, economic status, and management capability, it emerges as the top-ranked contractor in both methods due to its exceptional expertise and safety standards. These elevated levels of expertise and safety, coupled with the higher weights assigned by decision-makers to these criteria, contribute significantly to Contractor 2's superior ranking. A real-life case study improvement and refurbishment project is examined to demonstrate the value and highlight capabilities.