Practical bid evaluation method considering social costs in urban infrastructure projects

Many construction projects incur negative social costs during the construction period. The negative impacts on society and the environment associated with infrastructure projects in urbanized areas, which are regarded as public goods, can be reduced by taking social costs into account in the bid evaluation process. This paper presents a literature review of methods developed by researchers around the world for quantifying social costs. Then, on the basis of an indicator system established to evaluate the social costs associated with Urban infrastructure projects, a new bid evaluation process which takes into social costs into consideration is proposed. To overcome the difficulty in measuring social costs, a method was developed for synthetically evaluating the pre-bid estimate of social costs based on the experience of an expert or a group of experts. The model utilizes a comprehensive fuzzy set evaluation method to select the most reasonable bid.