Studying the progression of construction claims under different standard contract conditions : comparison, assessment, and modeling.

Abstract

As claims have become inevitable throughout the course of construction projects, claim-dispute administration mechanisms have gained considerable attention in the last years. These are offered by several standard contract conditions, including those drafted by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Engineers Joint Contract Documents Committee (EJCDC), ConsensusDocs, International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC), Joint Contracts Tribunal (JCT), and New Engineering Contract (NEC). In fact, contract conditions governing the administration of construction claims and disputes play a critical role, in that their underlying resolution mechanisms, when devised properly, can be expected to help expeditiously track the evolution of claims and disputes leading to their resolution. Such successful outcomes act to counteract the detrimental repercussions of unresolved claims on the progress of the project and the relationship between the parties to the contract. However, the literature is found to be lacking research work that can measure the efficiency of any proposed claim-dispute resolution mechanism or can advise as to an optimal (if any exists) such mechanism. Therefore, this research aimed at rigorously studying and analyzing the claim-dispute resolution mechanisms set forth in various standard conditions in order to assess their offered capabilities and merits on the progression of claims and disputes. The adopted methodology included: (1) performing a comprehensive analysis of the claim-dispute mechanisms, adopted by the aforementioned standard conditions, (2) investigating the spectrum of judgment-rendering roles and their properties, (3) synthesizing an all-encompassing timeline that covers all options that can be possibly applied within each of its modules while pinpointing their differences to aid contracting parties in adopting the most suitable one, (4) designing an agent-based model to simulate the progression of claims and visualize various scenarios, and (5) proposing a claim-dispute framewo