Contractor Recommendation Model Using Credit Networking and Collaborative Filtering

The credit of contractors in the construction market directly affects the cooperative intentions of owners. Although previous scholars have attempted to use credit to select appropriate contractors, they have rarely considered the trust relationship between decision-making and former owners. This work introduces and verifies a credit network recommendation model based on a collaborative filtering algorithm. The contractor’s credit established based on this model serves as a viable method for owners to select efficient contractors. The application of the model includes relevant information collection, neighbor set formation, contractor’s credit evaluation, and recommendation list formation, among which the neighbor set of the owner is used to calculate the comprehensive trust degree of the decision-making owner to the former owner. A time decay function is adopted to correct the difference in the trust relationship between an owner and a contractor introduced over time. To verify the feasibility of this model, an actual scenario was simulated, and the results obtained via simulations were compared and found to be consistent. Thus, a contractor with a high credit can be recommended to the decision-making owner. This approach is crucial for promoting contractors’ credit and conducive to the healthy development of the construction market.

This creative work has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license which allows copying, and redistribution as well as adaptation of the original work provided appropriate credit is given to the original author and the conditions of the license are met.