الفهرس 
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTINOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Globally, various studies have revealed that the wealth of any nation is
gauged by its performance in infrastructure provision through its construction
industry, specifically highway infrastructure. Hghway infrastructure is the
backbone of economic and social growth of any country. For an optimal
economic return, highway infrastructure projects have to be delivered with
reduced cost, on time and in accordance with technical specifications. Over the
last 50 years, the ”iron triangle” consisting of cost, time and quality at the three
vertices has become inextricably linked with measuring the success of project
management. This is perhaps not surprising, since over the same period these
criteria have usually been included in the description of project management.
Despite the importance of the highway projects and their impact on the
national economy, the highway network in Egypt is suffering from construction
defects and short-term pavement performance problems. Furthermore, concerns
are raised frequently on the poor performances of these projects in Egypt on
time and cost accounts, with directly subjected the construction of these projects
to delay and cost overrun. For that, it is of key importance to accomplish a study
on highway projects in Egypt in order to determine the sources of these
problems as well as suggesting recommendations for overcoming the negative
implications of these issues.
The main purpose of this thesis as mentioned in its title is to identify the
factors influencing quality, time and cost of the highway construction projects
in Egypt. Therefore, the first objective of the current study is to identify the
factors which can adversely affect the performance of the quality, time and cost.
Furthermore, specifying the effectiveness degree of the identified from the
perspectives of the owners, consultants and contractors.
In the present study 41, 38 and 26 factors have been identified to measure
their effect on the performance of the quality, time and cost respectively. By
analyzing the viewpoints of the owners, consultants and contractors regarding
the factors influencing the quality, time and cost through the application of
fuzzy triangular membership function, it has been noted that ”availability of
experienced staff in the owner’s and contractor’s teams during the project
execution” is the most critical factor affecting the quality of highway projects in
Egypt. While, the top significant factors affecting the time and cost performance
and leading to schedule delay and cost overrun are the ”contractor’s technical
staff is insufficient and ineligible to accomplish the project” and ”inadequate
preparation of the project concerning planning and execution” respectively.
The second objective of the study is to develop models which can be used
by the construction parties of the highway projects in Egypt for predicting the
percentages of quality level, delay and cost overrun through the application of
regression analysis method and statistical fuzzy approach. The validity of the
developed models with respect to the two methods has been checked and it has
been showed that the statistical fuzzy based model shows prediction accuracy
better than linear regression based model in predicting percentage of quality
level. While, the linear regression based model shows prediction accuracy better
than statistical fuzzy based model in predicting percentages of delay and cost
overrun.
The third objective is to present a methodology for improving and
assessing the performance of highway projects in Egypt. The developed
methodology has adopted the AHP method to identify the most important
factors and measures of success in order to improve and assessment the
highway projects performance in Egypt. Three hierarchical models have been
presented, these models are: a) ”the hierarchy model of the success factors
according to the project objectives”, b) ”the hierarchy model of the success
factors according to the project execution phases” and c) ”the hierarchy model
of the success measures”.
The last objective of the study is to develop a new contractor adjustment
factor (C.A.F) for highway construction projects in Egypt that depends on the
actual quality of the constructed pavement through the application of
KENLAYER software and comparing the results obtained from this method
with the results of the Egyptian Code for Urban and Rural Roads for
determining contractor adjustment factor in order to show the fairness of the
developed method. By comparing the results obtained from the suggested
method (C.A.F) with the results of the traditional method of the Egyptian Code
for Urban and Rural, a noticeable difference between the two methods is
observed. This difference is due to the C.A.F depends on the performance of the
whole constructed section while the traditional method depends on the
performance of each layer separately. Therefore, it is recommended to replace
the traditional method with the C.A.F method because it considered the
pavement cross section as one unit.