Abstract

Modular coordination in building construction has become increasingly popular, particularly in Northern Europe and North America. In Canada, modular construction came to considerable attention over the last decade due to its valuable effect on project constraints, safety, and preventing construction and demolition waste. However, the modular construction industry still adopts the same administrative procedures designed for the conventional construction industry, even though the features of modular and conventional construction are different in terms of construction processes and methods. Due to this trend, ambiguities in administrative documents are widely occurred and are one of the main causes to generate conflict, disputes, and claims between owners and modular suppliers as general contractors. As a first step in the this research to overcome this challenge, the research team focuses on investigating the contents and structures of the current standard contracts and modular RFPs, which are one of the major sources of confusion in modular construction, in order to mitigate and/or remove the ambiguities based on the considering the specifications of off-site construction procedures and system. In this case, this research illustrates a conceptual framework that has two parts: First, classification of the main sources of ambiguities in construction contracts (both Conventional and modular) and second, to identify the similarities and differences between Canadian documents (standard contracts and modular RFPs) and benchmark countries by applying through text processing and readability analysis. We applied text processing to find top terms, including terms with high frequency (TF) in each document, also high TF-IDF terms, which species occur in one document and not others then, we detected manually the three standard contracts and four RFPs and compare them with the output of literature review to identify the major issues that are common. The readability analysis shows the textual complexity of a document and to what extent the documents are difficult to read. The main findings indicate that the modular industry in Canada suffers from a lack of specific standard contract documents for modular construction.