Journal of Construction Research

The often volatile behavior of the Hong Kong housing construction activity is analysed using an annual econometric model for 1975 through 1999. Theory suggests that an increase in house prices leads to a rise in the housing stock, whereas an increase in interest rates leads to a decrease in the housing stock. However, the DiPasquale and Wheaton (1996) model does not seem to work for Hong Kong. Therefore, this study develops and uses an alternative model to show that the long-run equilibrium housing construction is constrained by total space absorption.

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.

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.

Who is responsible for construction safety: architects, engineers, contractors, or perhaps even clients? Safety of the constructed facility is normally the responsibility of the architect and engineer, whereas safety of the construction process is conventionally considered to be the contractor's responsibility. In many cases, construction accidents are, therefore, mainly considered as the contractor's responsibility. In fact, many factors associated with construction accidents can be traced back to the designer's responsibility as well as the client's responsibility. Under the barner of rethinking construction mainly introduced in the UK Construction industry, there is a need to include rethinking construction safety as a focus. This paper discuss a concept of rethinking construction safety. This concept contains an introduction of total safety management (TSM) in construction. The development of this concept is based on the constraint-response theory of construction accident. In this paper, the role of project participants in managing construction safety are examined. A framework of the total safety management is introduced. It summarises how all project participants involved in the project implementation process, from project concept, project design, and throughout project construction work together to control any risk of construction accident. The clients, designers, contractors and other participants share the responsibility of construction safety. Further development and implementation of this concept will help in improving safety performance in construction.

A comprehensive research for defining the organizational aspects of a construction contractor's subsystems was performed to provide these contractors with benchmarks for evaluating their subsystems. This paper describes the organizational aspects of contractors' safety management subsystems. The objective of this research was accomplished by surveying the literature, and by contacting twenty one construction industry experts through a comprehensive structured questionnaire. The research results define the organizational aspects of a safety management department in terms of key functions, location in the organization, key personnel, safety management tools, link with other departments, safety management program, and safety management effective practices. If a contractor implements the study recommendations to its safety management department then he would realize working and efficiency improvement in the safety.

Empirical evidence shows that e-commerce activities such as electronic transactions, project monitoring and tracking have all been successfully implemented in the banking, retail and manufacturing sectors. However, the benefits in the construction industry remain relatively new and have yet to be fully harnessed, particularly in small to medium-sized (SME) construction firms. Currently the construction industry has little knowledge and expertise of how to deal with the legal aspects of e-procurement when trading on-line. Recognising this, the research aims to explore the current state of knowledge and the differences in opinion held by SME contractors with regard to the legal issues about formation of a legal contract when trading on-line. The discussion will focus on the acceptance (or otherwise) of electronic mail, digital signatures and EDI for use in construction e-procurement, compared to the conventional (paper-based) methods in construction contracting environments. Results from the UK SMEs survey show that although the e-legal frameworks and initiative well founded and supported by the UK government there appears to be little enthusiasm from the surveyed construction SMEs to adopt e-procurement in practice. The paper concluded with discussion of the survey findings and recommendations for the construction SMEs e-procurement uptake.

Interviews with private correctional management ('operators') involved in the submission of design and construction tender documents during the 'Request for Proposal' (RFP) stage of private prison projects in Australia highlighted a number of problematic issues. These included (1) the content of design and construction briefs – in which the scant information and 'grey areas' in the briefs created uncertainty, impeded progress and caused operators to feel inadequate and unprepared (2) assembling the design bids – was problematic as operator's wished to challenge and deviate from the brief (3) methods of research - which included revisiting their own schemes, existing State facilities and those of competitors, while simultaneously adding to their body of knowledge, and (4) difficulties faced in the management of the tender bid – such as there being inadequate time to brief architects and contractors, managing personalities, protecting commercial interests in design, defining expectations, and maintaining team momentum. The study found that conflicts between government and private sector stakeholder expectations, commercial confidentiality, motivational issues and misunderstandings, adversely impacted upon the derivation of tender documents and affected the resultant product.

This study evaluated factors that could influence the risk perception of ironworkers. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression were used to analyze data collected through a survey to ironworkers in the United States. Logistic regression was used to investigate the influence of different variables studied on the probability of workers perceiving an action as dangerous, thereby providing an indication of how workers perceive risk in the tasks that they perform. Variables that were found to be significant in the analysis were accident and injury experience, experience in steel erection and construction work, safety incentive programs, and type of tasks performed.

Tower cranes are the most expensive and frequently shared resources on building construction sites. In practice, tower cranes are managed based on demand, urgency, and prioritized work tasks that must be performed within a set period of time on the field. Computer simulation proved to be an effective tool for aiding practitioners in modeling complex construction operations. Special Purpose Simulation (SPS) techniques have introduced computer modeling to the construction industry, resulting in a reduced model development time and a more user-friendly environment. Traditional SPS modeling techniques use "relationship logic links" to represent the logic contained in a modeled system. However, as the number of work tasks increases for the tower crane, the complexity of the relationship logic links model increases, resulting in limited acceptance by industry practitioners. This paper presents a new approach for handling process interactions for computer simulation modeling using "priority-rating logic," which is used to represent a tower crane's non-cyclic construction operations. The use of a priority rating logic control for model process interaction is implemented through the development of a SPS tower crane template. A case example and six variations to the case are presented to illustrate the advantages and viability of using the priority rating logic simulation modeling approach for tower crane operations.

This study is designed to obtain more scientific information about the residential roofing construction regarding the lack of applications of fall protection systems. Even though Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) enforces the use of some type of fall protection requirements, many residential roofing companies overlook these standards and rules. This study thus aims at systematically identifying the amount of lost productivity that occurs when workers use personal fall arrest systems (PFAS) for a roof-shingling task on the residential roof. Twelve male volunteers from the student population participated in this study. All who participated in this study had a proper training of a roof-shingling task. The simulated residential roofing task was performed at the slopes 18°, 26°, and 34° respectively. The results from this study showed that the slope had a significant effect (p < 0.001) on adjustment frequency and time of the personal fall arrest equipment. The amount of time and frequency of adjustment increased with an increase of slope. The subjects spent 6.8%, 9.1%, and 11.2% of their two-hour time blocks for adjusting the lanyards at 18°, 26°, 34° slopes respectively. The results of this study indicate that the large amount of time spent on unproductive activities while using a personal fall arrest system. In addition, this study shows that with an increase of slope comes an increase in the frequency of lanyard adjustments as well as the amount of time spent on these adjustments. More user-friendly fall protection systems might be able to save more lives while improving productivity in the roofing industry.

In the Developing Countries (DC), it is often very difficult to gather sufficient financial resources to lead a project of construction until term. It is thus advisable to adopt a methodology of suitable planning in the construction industry. This paper is interested in the manner of programming the rare resources to achieve the goal of construction. We propose for that the Sub-Structure Chaining Diagram (SSCD), which is an approach consisting in breaking up the budget into sub-budgets, each one corresponding to a precise sub-structure. The programming of the sequences of construction will be dictated at the same time by technical constraints and the availability of resources.

This paper discusses a design error case in a building project in Nepal, where the designer made the wrong assumptions in roof treatment work for waterproofing as well as for heat insulation purposes. Due to the design error, the project had faced profound roof leakage problems over 6000 sq. meters building area. The worst case was that the instructors and the students had to conduct training programs under the leaking roofs. Water proofing polymer not applied directly over concrete slab top and use of heavy concrete block as a heat insulation material were found to be the technical causes of roof leakage. However, carelessness from designer and supervisors also was profound for the leakage. The paper concludes with the lessons to be learned from the problem.

Employee turnover has been identified as one of the principal causes of poor performance, low competitiveness and high technology loss in the construction industry. Construction managers normally acquire knowledge and skills in construction methods and management techniques on the basis of long-term practice, and their turnover can significantly impact on a construction organisation's survival and development. Therefore, there has been an increasing need to understand the major critical variables affecting the turnover of construction managers. The aims of this research were to determine these variables and use them to develop a quantitative turnover prediction model. A system framework was first developed to categorise all turnover variables into job satisfaction, organisation commitment and demographic variables and the turnover intention was measured in diverse directions. Based on an empirical study in Hubei province in China, the statistical results indicate that seven job satisfaction and organisational commitment variables dominate the turnover intentions of construction managers.

There are many factors affecting the performance of public projects which are reviewed by the responsible entities (Government engineering agency) and controlled by the contractors. However, responsible entities and contractors have different viewpoints to identify the primary influential factors of a project because of differences in their roles and responsibility. Sometimes these differences cause a prime source for a project's defect, schedule delay, and even lawsuit. In order to perform a project successfully, the differences in the viewpoint of these two entities must first be understood clearly. To this end, this study synthesizes possible 91 influential factors of transportation projects from Taiwan official reports. Followed by the multi-criteria evaluation procedure and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, the primary influential factors are screened out and ranked with the priority orders. Surprisingly, there are forty co-primary factors selected by both the responsible entities and the contractors. However, it is found that the priority orders for the factors ranked by the responsible entities are somewhat different from those ranked by the contractors. The reasons why the rank orders are different between responsible entities and contractors are discussed. This is a comprehensively done research project and will be very useful for the personnel involved in oversea construction projects.

This paper provides an overview of wireless technologies, communication mechanisms, research and development in the field, and reviews the advantages that mobile IT provides to collaborative engineering and construction activities. It then discusses visualisation, research and practical applications developed for different construction problems. The possibility for a communication system transferring visual data using mobile technologies is explored and three scenarios are suggested. Finally, as a case study, the applicability of the proposed scenarios to the Turkish construction industry is investigated. Conclusions are then drawn on the benefits of integrating visualisation and mobile communication technologies in the construction industry.

A comprehensive research for defining the organizational aspects of a construction contractor's subsystems was performed to provide these contractors with benchmarks for evaluating their subsystems. This paper describes the organizational aspects of Planning and Scheduling subsystems. The objective of this research was accomplished by surveying the literature, and by communicating with twenty one construction industry experts through a comprehensively structured questionnaire. The research results define the organizational aspects of a planning and scheduling department with respect to the key functions, location in the organization, key personnel, duties of chief planning and scheduling engineer, planning and scheduling tools, planning and scheduling techniques, links with other departments and most effective practices.

These organizational aspects expound the contractors with the effective subsystem for bettering project effectiveness in largely cost oriented industry. The research reveals and recommends the various aspects and practices of the planning and scheduling subsystem which helps in organizing an ideal contractor system. The paper also presents an index mentioning all the identified organizational aspects of the planning and scheduling subsystem.