Studying Risks of Cost Overrun in Road Projects in Syria

Abstract

The development of any nation is gauged by its performance in infrastructure facilities especially the roads through its construction industry. Cost overruns are common problems in most roads projects in Syria. This problem effects all economics and developmental operations. The aim of this study is to identify and rank the causes of cost overruns in Syrian road construction projects, and to develop a Bayesian belief network to predict the conditional probability of the level of project risks.
Depending on descriptive and analysis methodology, literature review, conducting several interviews with experts, and then conducting questionnaire surveys to determine the reasons of probable cost overruns and their effects, and their importance level has been determined by merge probability and effect criteria.
The results of this study defined the main causes of cost overruns in road construction projects in Syria as: raise of material prices, ownership issues, inflation, the regular-quarter works, change of exchange rate, conducting non contract jobs and adding them to a post contract, poor equipment’s efficiency, slow decision making, inadequacy of equipment, and change of specifications of material and its quantity.