| Abstract: |
Interest in the Build-Operate- Transfer (BOT) scheme for infrastructure projects has been growing rapidly, and numerous projects have been implemented around the world. Through BOT projects, a government reallocates the risks and rewards in the development of large scale infrastructure projects to the private sector. The master keyin the successful implementation of the BOT infrastructure project in any country is the in-depth analysis of the project economic, environmental, social, political, legal, and financial feasibility aspects. The ultimately expensive, time consuming andsophisticated feasibility study of large scale infrastructure project often enforces governments, due to the lack of funds, to rely on the private sector to obtain the project feasibility study who may face the risk of bankruptcy if governments do notguarantee a sort of compensation to the lose bidders. Because both parties havedifferent targets willing to achieve from the project, the correlation between the conflicts in targets usually elongates the negotiation period for years and sometimesimposed the project to death. Sharing the needed extensive efforts and costs in the feasibility study process enhances the opportunities to establish a successful BOT project.Decision maker’s responsibility is to deeply understand, identify, and analyze a numerous qualitative (linguistic in nature) and quantitative decision factors that affect the project feasibility before undertaking the project. The qualitative decision factors are usually evaluated subjectively in a separate sheet before the evaluation of the quantitative factors is performed. The subjective judgment of qualitative factorsenforces decision maker to limit the number of factors being evaluated which result in unreliable decision.TIllS study provides a decision support multi-attribute model that could be used to determine the influence of the qualitative decision factors on the infrastructure project feasibility to BOT contractual systems. It provides a methodology for identifying theinterrelationships among these factors and their influences on the total project feasibility. This system recommends a new expert system decomposed approach based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique that is able to model therelationships between these decision factors. The new approach validation wasachieved by using three alternatives decomposed evaluation (Diaz, P2 only, P2= 1 00)approaches and the information obtained from three existed, in operation, case study projects (Sidi Karir Power plant project ’BOOT’, Marsa Allam airport project ’BOTin Egypt, and Channel Tunnel project linking UK and France ’BOT’). The outcomes of the three alternative approaches were correlated to the expert’s holistic evaluationsfor the three case study projects and concludes that ’P2=100’ approach is the closestto capture the holistic approach. It also provides an individual’s evaluation of thethree case study projects feasibility and suggests some possible strategies that would enhance, if they were used, the potentials to improve the feasibility of these projectsbefore undertaking them.The new decomposed approach provides the decision maker with the contribution of each decision factor towards the total project viability and enables him to determine the factors that would contribute most to improve the project viability.
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