Keywords: information technology, internet, broadband, infrastructure, life cycle, analytic hierarchy process.

Like the explosive consequence of the industrial revolution in the 18th century, the advancement of Information Technology(IT)in the recent decades, has led to great changes to human life, namely the e-life style emerges. The internet application is doubtlessly the most well-known and influential development [1,2,3,4]. As the communication speed becomes essential, the broadband network continues to dominate [5,6,7].

The U.S. Government announced the National Information Infrastructure (NII) initiative for global competence of industries and the leading position of IT in 1993. In recent years, Asian post-industrial countries have taken great endeavours to devise countrywide digital cogitation e.g. Singapore One, e-Korea, u-Japan etc. From the same policy perspective, the Mobile Taiwan Project (M-Taiwan) has been authorization by the government to develop Taiwan into Asia's most digitized country. The goal is to expand to six million broadband households by 2009 so as to improve both the infrastructure and the efficiency of the Government of Taiwan [8].

On the other hand, in the conventional sphere of civil engineering there is a trend to cross discipline and to integrate. Many possible topics are evaluated in terms of challenges, opportunities and risks. Thereafter the construction industry participants have some analogy with the start node of the critical path of IT infrastructure scheduling. Unfortunately, the solution to the different life cycles contrasts in infrastructure facilities with IT equipment at the planning phase is difficult, especially for the decision making of A/E in a nutshell.

The objective of this paper is to determine the multi-attributes planning solution for a broadband system for a mobile city. The major considerations are the demand of broadband, discipline organization, delivery strategy, and the construction method.

This paper applies the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to the selection of alternative approaches during the project planning phase. The methodology considers three main objectives for the selection of methods: flexibility, costs, and schedules. AHP is a decision-aiding method developed by Saaty [9]. The AHP aims at quantifying relative priorities for a given set of alternatives on a ratio scale, based on the judgment of the decision-maker, and stresses the importance of the intuitive judgments of a decision-maker as well as the consistency of the comparison of alternatives in the decision-making process. Since a decision-maker bases judgments on knowledge and experience, then decisions are made accordingly. The AHP approach agrees well with the behaviour of a decision-maker. The strength of this approach is that it organizes tangible and intangible factors in a systematic way, and provides a structured yet relatively simple solution to the decision making algorithm [10]. In addition, by breaking a problem down into a logical fashion from the large, descending in gradual steps, to the smaller and smaller, one is able to connect, through simple paired comparison judgments, the small to the large.

1

Jon Guice, "Looking Backward and Forward at the Internet", NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, USA, 1998.

2

Irtishad Ahmad, "Advantages and disadvantages of the internet", Journal of Management in Engineering", 6, July/August, 1999.

3

Scott D. James, "Introduction to the Internet for Engineers and Computer Scientists", Prentice Hall, 1997.

4

Dessler, Gray., "Human Resource Management", Prentice-Hall Inc. New Jersey, 2000.

5

Johannes M. Bauer et al., "Broadband: Benefits and Policy Challenges", The James H. and Mary B. Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law Michigan State University, 2002.

6

Office of Technology Policy, "Understanding Broadband Demand", U.S. Department of Commerce, 2002.

7

Telecommunications Industry Association, "The Economic and Social Benefits of Broadband Deployment", 2003.

8

IMD, "World Competitiveness Yearbook", 2003.

9

Saaty T.L., "The analytic hierarchy process", McGraw Hill, New York, 1980.

10

Skibniewski M.J., Chao L., "Evaluation of advanced construction technology with AHP method", Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, ASCE;118(3) , 1992. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9364(1992)118:3(577)

purchase the full-text of this paper (price £20)

go to the previous paper
go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the book description
purchase this book (price £135 +P&P)