The objective of this paper is to evaluate factors affecting the progress of completing construction of irrigation projects using state budget funds. To achieve the goal, to research and conduct surveys of investors, contractors, managers of irrigation construction investment projects. Analysis results from 269 valid questionnaires using SmartPLS 3.6 software showed that all 6 factors: Investor, Peripheral, Capital, Contractors, Consultant, Convenience, all factors have a positive impact on progress of completing irrigation construction projects using state budget funds in Thai Binh province, Vietnam.

Government construction projects are vital to the economic development of developing countries. However, although most of these projects suffer from abandonment, little evidence exists concerning the causes that account for this setback. This paper investigates the causes of government construction project abandonment in Ghana. We used a sequential data collection approach, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and questionnaire surveys to solicit the views of project management practitioners, contractors, and clients associated with Ghana government construction project implementation. Using factor analysis and structural equation modelling, we find that Ghanaian government construction project abandonment is influenced by five sets of causes: political leadership, culture, external forces, resources (including funding) and administrative/institutional bottlenecks. Three of these sets of causes – political leadership, cultural and external forces, are the primary causes, while resources (including funding) and administrative/institutional causes are secondary causes.

The current study aims to provide an overview of the research on political risk using the Web of Science（WoS）database as well as summarize research results and put forward some suggestions for research directions of political risk in international construction projects. It is the first time scientometric analysis of political risk research is executed. In this regard, the papers related to political risk in the WoS database have been retrieved and the literature is sorted out by visual and content analysis methods. Visual analysis is used to analyze the research overview, knowledge base, and research hotspots of this field. The content analysis method is adopted to expound the current research focus from three perspectives inducing the influence of political risk, risk assessment, and risk management measures. The results show that in the political risk context, the number of publications has experienced an increasing trend in recent years. Based on the existing literature on political risk for all companies, this overview provides some suggestions to address the political risk in international construction projects in the future. The results contribute to the scholars understanding of the research overview, research hotspots, and future research directions of political risk research in construction projects.

In open travelling salesman subset-tour problem (OTSSP), the salesman needs to traverse a set of k (≤n) out of n cities and after visiting the last city, the salesman does not necessarily return to the central depot. The goal is to minimize the overall traversal distance of covering k cities. The OTSSP model comprises two types of problems such as subset selection and permutation of the cities. Firstly, the problem of selection takes place as the salesman’s tours do not contain all the cities. On the other hand, the next problem is about to determine the optimal sequence of the cities from the selected subset of cities. To deal with this problem efficiently, a hybrid nearest neighbor technique based crossover-free Genetic algorithm (GA) with complex mutation strategies is proposed. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first hybrid GA for the OTSSP. As there are no existing studies on OTSSP yet, benchmark instances are not available for OTSSP. For computational experiments, a set of test instances is created by using TSPLIB. The extensive computational results show that the proposed algorithm is having great potential in achieving better results for the OTSSP. Our proposed GA being the first evolutionary-based algorithm that will help as the baseline for future research on OTSSP.

A simple multi-attribute decision-making method based on ranking of alternatives and attributes is proposed in this paper. The method ranks the alternatives with respect to each of the attributes based on the corresponding performance measures. Similarly, the ranks are assigned to the attributes based on their importance as perceived by the decision maker. The ranks assigned to the alternatives with respect to each of the attributes and the ranks assigned to the attributes are converted to appropriate weights and the final composite scores of the alternatives are computed using these weights. An interesting feature of the proposed method is that the qualitative attributes (i.e. the attributes expressed in linguistic terms) need not require the use of fuzzy logic. The proposed method is very simple and useful in situations of limited time availability, presence of qualitative attributes, imprecise/incomplete/partial data, and decision maker’s limited attention and capability to process the information. The proposed method is proved easier and better compared to the other widely used decision-making methods. The proposed method will be tested further on more realistic problems of the industrial environment and the results will be reported soon.