Narrow Results

Construction processes planning and effective management are extremely important for success in construction business. Head of a design must be well experienced in initiating, planning, and executing of construction projects. Therefore, proper assessment of design projects' managers is a vital part of construction process. The paper deals with an effective methodology that might serve as a decision support aid in assessing project managers. Project managers' different characteristics are considered to be more or less important for the effective management of the project. Qualifying of managers is based on laws in force and sustainability of project management involving determination of attributes value and weights by applying analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and expert judgement methods. For managers' assessment and decision supporting is used additive ratio assessment method (ARAS). The model, presented in this study, shows that the three different methods combined (ARAS method aggregated together with the AHP method and the expert judgement method) is an effective tool for multiple criteria decision aiding. As a tool for the assessment of the developed model, was developed multiple criteria decision support system (MCDSS) weighting and assessment of ratios (WEAR) software. The solution results show that the created model, selected methods and MCDSS WEAR can be applied in practice as an effective decision aid.

This paper aims at developing a model to measure and evaluate the performance and productivity of the construction of steel structure projects (SSPs). Practitioners and experts comprising a statistically representative sample were invited to participate in a structured questionnaire survey to achieve the objective. The questionnaire consisted of 17 factors that were classified under the following four primary categories, with terms such as feasibility study stage, planning stage, design, and engineering stage, and construction stage. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) were used for designing a model on MATLAB for measuring and evaluating the projects’ performance of the Construction of SSP based on the 14 factors that affect the steel structure process. The results suggest that the proposed ANN model for SSP can produce measures and evaluate the projects’ performance quickly and accurately when actual data is available for model training. The user can enter the values of main factors that affect their projects’ performance to produce an accurate output of the evaluation for the projects’ performance and productivity. The construction industry can use the findings of this paper as a basis for improving the projects’ performance of the construction for SSP.

It has been increasingly recognised that construction activity imposes external costs to the environment. This paper aims to review the benefits and major problems in the implementation of ISO 14000 EMS in the Hong Kong construction industry. This study surveyed major construction firms in Hong Kong to uncover the hindrance factors contributing to the low adoption of ISO 14000. Based on the findings, this paper identifies and ranks the perceived order which hinders the construction firms' adoption of ISO 14000. The case study in Hong Kong serves as a reference point for understanding the problems in the implementation of ISO 14000 in other countries.

Specifically, this study found that the four major obstacles to ISO 14000 implementation are: lack of government pressure; lack of client requirement/supports; expensive implementation cost; and sub-contracting systems, which create difficulties in managing the EMS. Since the government is a very dominant client, the extent to which the Government wishes to restrict its choice of tenderer to those firms that have an environmental management system in place, will demonstrate its commitment to environmentally responsible operations. The public sector clients play a critical role in driving the construction industry to improve its operations through contractual requirements. Education of the end-users is also important to create market demand for environmentally friendly construction. To an extent, professional institutions and other industry bodies can help to instill a greater sense of accountability among industry participants by stipulating acceptable standards of behaviour and establishing a supportive regulatory framework.

The factors that affect the quality of building construction projects in Gaza Strip are identified. Nominal Group Technique (NGT) was used at the preliminary stage to identify these factors and to assist in developing a questionnaire to identify and rank these factors and the associated sub-factors. 65 contracting companies and 24 consulting offices participated in responding to the questionnaire. Using factor analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis, the most important factors affecting the quality of the building construction projects were identified and modeled. Among the most significant factors identified are: characteristics of site layout, experience of site staff, consistency of design documents, the financial power of the contractor, availability of construction materials, subcontractors, political environment, and the control systems used.

A meta-synthesis approach was used to identify, synthesize, and categorize appropriately factors in the literature that contribute to design documentation quality. The categories include factors on quality attributes, quality indicators, and quality-influencing factors. Findings indicate that the quality of design documentation in practice is unsatisfactory, therefore, there is a need for collaboration between the owner, designers, and end-users to improve design documentation quality. The results offer pragmatic data on design documentation quality in the construction industry between the years 1992 and 2019. However, further research on the significant impacts of poor-quality design documentation on construction projects is recommended.

In groundwater construction projects, many variables affect construction schedule and cost overruns. This paper aims to examine and evaluate the relative importance of the main factors that cause delay and cost overruns in groundwater construction projects. In order to identify these factors, a questionnaire survey was conducted. Questionnaires were sent to professionals involved in groundwater construction projects in Ghana. The data was analyzed and ranked, based on the profession of the respondents and their roles in the industry (i.e. owners, contractors and consultants). The questionnaire survey consisted of 49 factors which were grouped into nine major categories, and the level of importance of the categories was measured and ranked by the relative importance weights. The percentage agreements in ranking among the three groups were measured. The results shows that: (1) the surveyed groups generally agreed that the project financing category is the main reason for groundwater construction delay and cost overruns, whereas the labor category is the least; (2) owners, consultants and contractors substantially agree on the ranking of the major categories of delay and cost overruns factors. The paper concludes that all the three groups felt that project financing, micro-economics, natural conditions and materials factor categories play a predominant role in causing delay and cost overruns to groundwater construction projects.

In this paper, we propose a construction of a new cubic spline-wavelet basis on the hypercube satisfying homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Wavelets have two vanishing moments. Stiffness matrices arising from discretization of elliptic problems using a constructed wavelet basis have uniformly bounded condition numbers and we show that these condition numbers are small. We present quantitative properties of the constructed basis and we provide a numerical example to show the efficiency of the Galerkin method using the constructed basis.

Despite the popularity of motivation research in the latter half of the twentieth century, little empirical evidence exists of the factors influencing the motivation of different occupational groups within the construction industry. Furthermore, no significant attempt has been made to compare the job motivation level difference of the employees working in large companies or small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This research attempts to fill these knowledge gaps by exploring the motivation of members of three occupational groups (professional engineers, skilled trade-craft workers and unskilled or semi-skilled general operatives), working for a variety of SMEs and large sized businesses. The findings reveal that professional employees are predominantly motivated by intrinsic reward, which contrasts markedly with unskilled workers who demonstrate a desire for extrinsic rewards. However, company size does not appear to affect the motivation of any of the groups studied significantly.

The scene of Brazilian infrastructure has changed in recent years, highlighting the growing participation of the private sector and the falling public investments as a result of the constraints on the federal public expenditure as from 2016, the Lava Jato operation, and reduction in the number of available loans. Particularly, the Lava Jato operation led most Brazilian infrastructure corporations to fully rethink their processes and opened the way for new national and international companies. In the restructuring phase, project management has shown itself to be sensitive to the changes made. In this sense, fostering risk management in the corporations, combined with efficient cost management, tends to become a decisive factor to guarantee the results of projects. Integrated management solutions, obtaining licenses, regularization, and authorization also became essential to attain efficiency in the use of resources. Considering the scenario of infrastructure projects in Brazil, this chapter discusses the market and internationalization trends in infrastructure projects, and the current state of project management knowledge through diagnosis and cases. Aiming to contribute to a better comprehension of procurement, risk, cost, and stakeholder management, as well as by using Building Information Modelling (BIM) processes to support the efforts to address challenges in the sector, some recent research results are summarized. Further, ethics and governance as pillars for infrastructure project management are also discussed in the text. In the conclusion, we present some proposals about new management areas that can be truly relevant in infrastructure project management in a developing country.

Frequency hopping spread spectrum and direct sequence spread spectrum are two main spread coding technologies. Frequency hopping sequences are needed in FH-CDMA systems. In this paper, a construction of optimal sets of frequency hopping sequences is presented through perfect nonlinear functions. The construction is based on the set-theoretic characterization of an optimal set of FH sequences. In the procedure, the notion of mixed difference functions is proposed and used.

In this paper, a new spreading network was constructed and the corresponding immunizations were proposed. The social ability of individuals in the real human social networks was reflected by the node strength. The negativity and positivity degrees were also introduced. And the edge weights were calculated by the negativity and positivity degrees, respectively. Based on these concepts, a new asymmetric edge weights scale-free network which was more close to the real world was established. The comparing experiments indicate that the proposed immunization is priority to the acquaintance immunization, and close to the target immunization.

Objectives: The study was to establish a precise three-dimensional (3D) finite element model (FEM) of the distal radioulnar joint (DRUJ) and then to validate its accuracy for the application to the research on clinical biomechanics. Materials and methods: The right forearm DRUJ of a volunteer (male, 28 years old, 62 kilograms) was scanned by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The resulting sectional images were input into MIMICS10.1 and ANSYS10.0 to generate 3D FEM of the DRUJ. With this FEM, the bending load, axial compression load and the torsion load conditions were simulated, and the vonmises stress distribution of the DRUJ was detected. The simulation results were compared with the biomechanics experiment results which were reported by the literatures. Results: The constructed FEM consisted of 333,805 elements and 508,384 nodes. Together, the simulation results with this FEM were in consistent with those of the reported experiments in bending load, axial compression load and torsion load conditions. Discussion: The 3D FEM of the DRUJ can reflect the real geometric structure of the DRUJ objectively and the simulation with this FEM can predict the results of the biomechanics experiments successfully.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the construction industry in four practices. The study uses construction statistical data and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) numbers for the analyses. The study covers the construction industry and practices in the context of economic outlook, procurement trends, licensing, construction and housing data, etc. The analyses show the comparison of the practices in detail. It also presents the effects of macro and micro economic factors in overall construction industry performance.

While there has been increasing emphasis on reducing challenges in construction project management linked to cost, time, quality, and safety, limited attention has been paid to project communication management (PCM). The aim of this chapter is to fill this gap by addressing the question: What practical measures will engender effective PCM in construction in developing countries? Drawing on examples of construction project practices, it is proposed, in this chapter, that project success is endangered when the planning, collection, sharing, and management of information are ineffective. The behavior-, culture-, diversity-, and platform-related issues that affect communication and project outcomes are examined. In the chapter, overall, emphasis has been placed on the notion that communication management has played a vital, but underrecognized, role in the realization of project performance in construction in developing countries. It is suggested that an effective practical approach to managing communication in construction in developing countries would be to mitigate language- and cultural diversity-related barriers in tandem with the use of digital technologies. The conceptual argument is that enabling social interaction and use of technologies curbs PCM challenges in construction in developing countries.