Identification and Ranking of Effective Factors on Accepting Trenchless Technology

In today’s society, pipelines as vital arteries play a significant role in maintaining people’s peace and satisfaction. According to growing developments in societies, the necessity of constructing, refurbishing, repairing, and maintaining underground installations such as petrol pipelines, gas, water, wastewater, runoffs, and connections is considered as the indispensable part of civil and installation operations. Regarding problems stemming from the open trench excavation methods and growth of underground installations, using trenchless technologies in the construction industry is increasing in order to solve the problems more economically and effectively. The present project aimed at recognizing and ranking the most important effective factors in accepting the trenchless technology in Iran. This research has a practical target and has been performed by the survey and the describing method. The statistical population of this research includes middle managers, contractors, and civil projects engineers of Isfahan province. In this regard, a sample of 87 people was randomly selected and the questionnaire was distributed among them. Eventually, a total of 68 questionnaires were collected with favorable consistency. This questionnaire has been designed by the investigator according to the Likert scale with high stability. Accordingly, the factors were grouped in the form of 28 criteria and 8 major groups as the effective factors on accepting the trenchless technology in Iran. Descriptive and inferential methods and the Friedman test were used to rank the effective factors, and the SPSS software was applied to analyze the data. Among the 8 major groups of executive management, environmental, demographics, technology, economically, project productivity (construction management), organizational, and individual had the first to the 8th rank, respectively. In addition, control system, risks, environment, budget, chief executive officer (CEO), special and geographical performance, and direct costs ranked the top among the 28 factors.