Understanding time delay disputes in construction contracts

Most of the construction projects are executed through contracts which are generally not easy to comprehend even by professionals. With advancement in technology and mammoth requirement of infrastructure in developing countries like India, there has been increase in size and complexities in the nature of projects. This gives rise to further ambiguities in the prevailing contract forms eventually making contract forms more complex and difficult and causing adversarial impacts such as increase in number and frequency of claims and disputes besides time and cost overruns. To overcome the worsening scenario, it is essential to develop a system that can assist the contract administrators to understand and evaluate worth of their claims prior to taking it to litigation. An attempt has been made to devise a rule-based expert system to achieve this objective with a limited scope of disputes arising out of Time Delay and Extension in Indian Construction Contracts.