Babar Ali
Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Construction
Biography
Babar Ali is a PhD candidate in the Melbourne School of Design at The University of Melbourne. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan with academic distinction. He has been awarded a Gold Medal for his performance during Masters degree in Construction Engineering and Management from NUST, Pakistan. Prior to joining University of Melbourne for his PhD, he was working as Contract Engineer on infrastructure projects in Australia. During his professional career, he also worked as Planning Engineer in Pakistan on various construction projects including High Rise Buildings and Hydro Power projects. His research interests are in the fields of construction contracts, construction claims, advanced construction technology, digitization in construction and information management systems.
Thesis
Information Management Framework for Disruption Claims in Construction and Engineering Projects
Disruption claims in construction projects are contractual requests that enable a contractor to claim for the entitlement of additional time and extra cost from the project’s owner due to occurrence of certain disruption events for which the contractor is not responsible such as unexpected site conditions, design errors, shortage of labour, shortage of material and non-working weather etc. However, the difficulties in transparent and uniform collection, storage and retrieval of information required for disruption claims create complexities in substantiation and resolution of these claims. Consequently, the process of disruption claims often leads to protracted disputes between contractor and owner that cause unnecessary expenses, time loss and poor relationships among contracting parties. Therefore, in the light of growing maturity of Information and Communications (ICT) and advanced digital technologies in construction process and approaches, Babar’s research aims to develop an information management framework for substantiating disruption claims to minimise disputes.
The technology driven information management framework of this research will fulfil the gap of non-availability of platform that ensures transparent and uniform collection, storage and retrieval of information required for substantiating disruption claims. For practitioners, it will be used to obtain contemporaneous information on disruptions and their impacts on project’s activities. Moreover, it will encourage the transparency and agreement among contracting parties on the information being used for disruption claims, which will help in avoiding, minimizing and resolving disputes and its unnecessary costs due to these claims.