Bullwhip Effect Analysis
A significant phenomenon in supply chain management (SCM), first observed by Forrester (1961), shows that the orders variability along the upstream direction is amplified in supply chain networks. Subsequently this observation was termed as bullwhip effect by Lee, Padmanabhan, and Whang (1997a, 1997b). Such extreme distortion for the actual end customer demand to upstream have been proved to significantly increase costs and lower performance (Chen, L. and Lee, H. L. 2012; Wang, X. and Disney, S. M. 2016). In this regard, many research has been achieved to investigate the bullwhip effects from the perspective of supply chain and operation research. In construction industry, Taylor, J. and Bjornsson, H. (1999) firstly studied demand distortion of construction material and discovered that cumulative orders from contractors amplified along the upstream to the supply house due to the inability to share information. However, unfortunately, very limited research has been done to focus on the bullwhip effect in construction industry.

Current study regarding the reduction of bullwhip effect can be briefly divided into three main aspects. One stream is to focus on information sharing mechanism to decrease bullwhip effect as well as increase supply chain stability (Ouyang, Y. 2007; Agrawal, S. et al., 2009; Dai, H. et al., 2016, Dominguez, R. et al., 2014). In fact, technologies, aimed at enhancing information sharing and communication mechanism, has been broadly applied in construction such as BIM and web-based methods, which largely aid to reduce bullwhip effect. Another stream aims to combine strategies or optimal models such as ordering strategy, forecasting policy, game theory, fuzzy method, multi-agent system and etc. to weaken bullwhip impact on supply chain (Costas, J. et al., 2015; Fu, D. et al., 2015; Wang, Z. et al. 2015; Zarandi, M. H.