Improving decision quality: A risk-based go/no-go decision for build-operate-transfer (BOT) projects

The build-operate-transfer (BOT) mechanism is used worldwide to promote diverse infrastructure projects. Success in BOT projects mainly depends on selecting the right project to promote. The right project selection initiates from identifying a presumably viable project to pursue at the early project initiation process. When deciding on a prospective project to pursue, developers in many cases rely on their judgment, intuition, or rules of thumb rather than analytic evaluation of the complex BOT characteristics and specific project conditions. It is expected that they will improve the quality of their decisions if a methodical formalism is provided that can help systematically recognize (i) risk factors in the BOT project environment, (ii) the impact of these decisions on project feasibility, and (iii) strategic alternatives to enhance these decisions. The main objective of this research is to develop a risk-based, go/no-go decision model as the formalism, which consists of a decision process model and a decision variables relationship model. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the computational procedures of the model. In an effort to validate the model, this research invites 60 test subjects and adopts convergent experimental studies.