Seyed Vahid Oskuee - Assistant Professor, Iran Banking Institute (IBI), Central Bank of Iran, Iran
Behrouz Zarei - Associated Professor, University of Tehran, Iran
Amin Hakim - Assistant Professor, University of Tehran, Iran

Due to the complex nature of the projects, their management is significantlydifferent in traditional organizations. The problem of the delays in the projects is aglobal concern and the petrochemical industry in Iran is no exception. Projectdelays and their outcomes such as eliminating their initial economic feasibility,dissatisfied stakeholders and affiliated organizations have forced project managersto firmly focus on the causes of the delays and alternatives to improveperformances. Such valuable knowledge of the delay causes should be explored,expanded and reused. Revolutions of Information Technology (IT) and ArtificialIntelligence (AI) have prepared the ground for acquisition, storing, and sharing theprojects’ knowledge, on the belief that knowledge acquisition and representationare the bottlenecks. This paper presents a research to cast light on the underlyingdelay of petrochemical projects in Iran and attempts at representing this invaluableknowledge through a semantic network.

Iranian petrochemical projects delay, Delay causes, Knowledge management, Knowledge representation, Semantic networks