Purpose. The purpose of this study is to examine the causes of delays in road construction projects in the Benin Republic from the consultant, client, and contractor perspectives. Design/Methodology/Approach. Through construction project reports, 20 factors that could cause delays in road construction projects were identified. The factors were arranged into a questionnaire, which was distributed to three separate experts. The fuzzy PIPRECIA (PIvot Pairwise RElative Criteria Relevance Assessment) method was used to calculate the independent importance of each delay factor. The Spearman and Pearson correlation coefficients were used to test the method’s consistency. Findings. The top five road construction project delays in the Benin Republic, according to the analysis of the 20 factors considered, are project funding, slowness during the client-endorsed payment process, scarcity of professional personnel, delay in indemnifying reimbursement (land-owners), and price escalation. This shows that of the various types of delays, the financial delay group is the most crucial. Originality/value. This study evaluates the causes of delays in road construction projects in the Benin Republic for the first time in literature. This study also examined the top 5 delay factors in road construction projects. This study is based on reports from road construction projects and a performed questionnaire survey. Based on the findings, measures have been formulated to aid project managers to alleviate the road construction delays in the Benin Republic. In addition, this study is practical for both scholars and road construction parties and provides a complete and verifiable analysis of the progress of a road construction project to make it easier and attain a competitive level of time, cost, and quality for successful road construction.

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Abstract. Slope unit extraction is integral to earthquake-induced landslide analysis. The conventional watershed and hydrological slope unit extraction methods are precarious with a sudden change in slope gradient along the flow direction, which result in slope unit heterogeneity, conjoint slopes, and boundary defects of the extracted slope unit. This paper addresses this research gap by proposing a mechanical slope unit extraction method that combines watershed points, hydrological, and segmentation methods. This proposed method defines a slope unit as a closed homogeneous space of points overlaid by a mesh having a variance in the slope gradient along its flow direction. The method extracts and uses 3D points to solve slope heterogeneity defects associated with the conventional watershed methods, segmentation to solve boundary defects, and considers the slope pattern and incident ray at a depth to estimate the possibility of earthquake-induced landslides. Ghana (West Africa) is selected to test the proposed slope unit extraction method. The result shows that the method overcame boundary problems, heterogeneity, sudden gradient change, and conjoint slope unit defects associated with the conventional watershed and hydrological method and shows a uniform slope unit for landslide analysis in Ghana. The landslide prediction rate of Ghana also presents 70.9 % landslide inventory, giving an estimated threshold displacement of 9 cm.

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