The Civil Engineering Department at the College of Engineering, University of Baghdad, held Ph. D thesis examination titled:
((Optimization of The Public Sector Projects Selection Based on The Limited Financial Allocations
The examining committee was:
- Prof.Dr.Sawsan Rasheed chairman
- Prof.Dr. Hatem Khalifa member
- Prof. Dr.Kadum Razeej member
- ا Assist. Prof. Tariq abdulmajeed member
- Assist. Prof. Ahmmed M. Raoof member
- Assist. Prof. Abbas Burhan supervisor
Summarized as below:
Each government struggles to exploit the possible opportunities for gaining citizens’ satisfaction and continue providing better services. This objective may be represented by releasing new projects to meet citizens’ requirements or developing current projects. Releasing of new governmental projects is constrained by available resources, time, social, human, economic, and many more constraints. Financial allocation can be considered one of the most obstacles that difficult to be tackled. In other words, project selection process is considered a multi-criteria optimization environment that needs to be developed.
More than one thousand and four hundred Milliard American Dollars is the total budget of Iraq from 2003 to 2021. Despite all these huge amounts of expenditures, Iraq is still suffering from the same problems from about twenty years ago without a radical solution on the horizon. Many reasons led to this result, one of the most important reasons being the non-optimized project selection process that is chosen as the research problem. Even more one of the corruption approaches is allocating the finance for projects that selected directly without adopting optimization of selection process.
The research’s main aim is to develop a multi-criteria optimization project ranking and selection model using hygiene methodologies consisting of several optimization methods and sequential stages. The proposed model can deal with numerical and linguistic criteria taking into consideration experts’ evaluations for proposed projects, in addition to criteria weights. The optimization methods have been used were Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Combinative Distance-based Assessment (CODAS), Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment of Evaluations (PROMETHEE II), and Evaluation of Mixed data method (EVAMIX). Fuzzy logic method is used for data processing that relevant to qualitative criteria or linguistic expert’s evaluations. The importance of the proposed model is making projects ranking and selection process doesn’t dependent on economic measures that govern overall process to non – measurable criteria that affect the organization’s success, and ensure a maximum level of financial resource usage optimization.
A computerized application was programmed using MATLAB R2018 platform, while Microsoft Excel were selected for data feeding, and result output collection taking into consideration end-user requirements and recommendations. Project ranking and selection optimization program (PRSO) is assessed by a group of experts concerning final results accuracy and program flexibility to ensure a higher degree of compatibility and end-user satisfaction.
The research results shown better preference for hygiene fuzzified PROMETHEE II method for public sector project ranking and selection optimization even if it’s compared with EVAMIX method
After conducting the public discussion and listening to the student’s defense, the thesis was accepted with an excellent degree
