Change Orders in Iraqi Construction Projects

Change orders in construction are considered to be one of the greatest controversial problems that must be handled and also considered to be difficult for project management to reasonably resolve as any variation leads to claims. Any construction contract is agreed under the concept of “good faith,” which include that the parties will have to trust each other in order to work on agreeing on a contract and that contract is considered to be reasonable when there is no purpose of taking benefit of the parties throughout the contract life. However, as soon as the contract wants to be changed by generating a change order, the parties behavior changes in relation to the initial “good faith” environment

The aim of the paper is to find the causes of the change order and its effect on the projects and then analyze the causes using data mining techniques.

The methodology of the paper includes the following steps. Several factors that lead to change orders were gathered from the literature review. A questionnaire was formed and then distributed to the managers, owners, contractors and engineers. A review of the project's documents was conducted to find the number of change orders in the project and analysis of the causes of the change orders was done using data mining techniques.

The change orders have a harmful impact on the cost and it must be minimized, the change order was analyzed using Adda Boost technique and the accuracy was about 95 which is considered a very good result.