41. Towards Automated Analysis of Ambiguity in Modular Construction Contract Documents (A Qualitative & Quantitative Study)

Modular coordination in building construction has become increasingly popular, particularly in Northern Europe and North America. Modular construction in Canada gained considerable attention over the last decade due to its positive impact on project constraints, safety, and preventing construction and demolition waste. However, the modular construction industry still adopts the same administrative procedures designed for the conventional construction industry even though the features of modular and conventional construction are different in terms of construction processes and methods. Due to this trend, ambiguities in administrative documents are widely occurred and are one of the main causes to generate conflict, disputes, and claims between owners and modular suppliers as general contractors. As a first step in the on-going research to overcome this challenge, the research team focuses on investigating the contents and structures of the current contracts, which are one of major confusion sources in modular construction, in order to mitigate and/or eliminate the ambiguities in the contracts based on the considering the features of modular construction processes and methods. In this respect, this paper presents a conceptual framework, which is: (1) to classify the major ambiguities in conventional and modular construction contracts; (2) to identify the similarities and differences between Canadian contract documents and benchmark countries. We use text mining to find top terms, including terms with high TF in each document, and high TF-IDF terms, which specifically occur in one document and not others then, we detect manually the three standard contracts and compare them with the output of literature review to identify the major issues that are common.