Comparative Comparison of Contractors' Evaluation Criteria, Sub-Criteria and Indicators in Water Industry Tender Using Questionnaire and Text Mining

The efficiency of contractors selection in infrastructure projects is always one of the main concerns of employers. The purpose of this study is to propose a new method for specification of evaluation criteria, according to the type of project under assignment and prioritization, and to determine the proposed score of the evaluation criteria of the contractors using two different methods. The first involves statistical analysis of the questionnaires and the second involves the text mining of the interviews. For this purpose, after library studies, fieldwork and questionnaire design, questionnaires were given to experts in the industry and their statistical analysis identified important criteria and sub-criteria and then interviewed another group of experts. Using the text mining and clustering of interview texts, the criteria and indices of contractors' evaluation were identified and the results of these two methods were compared with the bidding law implementing regulations in Iran. SPSS software was used to analyze the interviews and K-means algorithm was used to interviews text mining. The findings of the study indicate that the results of the text mining and questionnaire are in agreement and It can be concluded that the identified criteria have acceptable accuracy and generalization capability and organizations can use these criteria and evaluation indicators to select the most suitable contractor in the tenders. Identified Criteria, in addition to covering all the criteria introduced in the Bidding Law Implementing Regulations, also include two new criteria, namely Claim Management and Safety Management & Quality Control.