Editor’s Note

“Price and Nonprice Criteria for Contractor Selection”: Although the public sector has a long tradition of using the lowest bid as the aware criterion for contracts, reliance on nonprice criteria is increasing. It is likely that nonprice criteria support the alignment of owner and contractor interests and that bidder behavior should be affected by the likelihood of repeated contracts and by the transparency of owners’ evaluation procedures. Waara and Bröchner describe how public owners use multiple criteria for the award of construction contracts, by analyses of 386 bidding documents reflecting practice in Swedish municipalities in 2003.

“Study of Styles and Outcomes in Construction Dispute Negotiation”: The adversarial nature of the construction industry contributes to the occurrence of construction disputes. During negotiation, personality characteristics of the disputants affect their behavior and thus the outcomes. Authors Cheung, Yiu, and Yeung focus on a study conducted with construction professionals in Hong Kong to compare and contrast negotiating behaviors with negation outcomes. The results are examined by the use of multiple regression analysis.

“The Gulf of Mexico Decommissioning Market”: The Gulf of Mexico offshore decommissioning market is the most diverse and competitive service contract environment in the world. Authors Kaiser and Iledare describe the business, engineering, and market environment of decommissioning services in the Gulf of Mexico and provide a first-order approximation of the number of structures expected to be removed over a $25\text{-}\text{year}$ time horizon. The regulatory requirements and primary stages of decommissioning are reviewed, and the management, bid/tender process, and negotiation strategies are described.

“Job Performance Evaluation for Construction Companies: An Analytic Network Process Approach”: Because existing literature has suggested that the construction industry does not pay attention to the importance of job performance evaluation, authors Cheng and Li aim at presenting an employee performance evaluation process for construction companies. Because human resource is a core economic asset, organizations are responsible for helping their employees work at their optimal level. An analytic network process is used to assign weights to a set of job performance criteria, and an example is demonstrated to illustrate how to construct an appropriate respective supermatrix.

“Improving the Safety and Efficiency of Materials Transfer at a Construction Site by Using an Elevator”: Perttula, Korhonen, Lehtelä, Rasa, Kitinoja, Mäkimattila, and Leskinen present a study that compares materials transfer at a construction site, either by carrying manually or by using an elevator. Data were collected at a construction site by using two methods: continuous automatic collection of data on the use of the elevator and measuring and observing the transportation of some products when different delivery systems were used. Health and safety risks are analyzed and quantified upon which conclusions are drawn.

“Downside Risks in Construction Projects Developed by the Civil Service: The Case of Spain”: Authors de la Cruz, del Caño, and de la Cruz aim to improve the efficiency of the construction management process performed by the Spanish civil service, identify and analyze the main risks in these kinds of projects, and also establish potential risk responses. The effort includes a list of 96 risk events, categorized and prioritized first by impact and then by frequency. Each risk event is associated to a set of potential responses selected from a group of 117 identified potential responses and categorized and prioritized by potential efficiency and difficulty of implementation.

“Modeling Cost Escalation in Large Infrastructure Projects”: As cost overruns in large infrastructure projects have been commonplace in the past decades, budgeting for cost escalation is a major issue in the planning phase of these projects. In this paper, Touran and Lopez review various methods for forecasting the escalation factor and study the changes in construction costs in the past $25\text{years}$ . Furthermore, the authors introduce a system for modeling the escalation uncertainty in large multiyear construction projects.

“Scheduling Construction Projects Using Evolutionary Algorithm”: Jaśkowski and Sobotka apply evolutionary algorithms to solve the problem of minimizing the construction project duration in deterministic conditions with limited accessibility of workforce and equipment. The method’s versatility includes the ability to be applied to solving more complex problems that occur in construction practice such as scheduling resources on the scale of a whole company, not only the single project.

“Critical Factors Affecting Schedule Performance: Evidence from Indian Construction Projects”: Because over 40% of Indian construction projects are facing time overruns ranging from $1\text{to}252\text{months}$ , researchers have been working to suggest possible remedial measures. Iyer and Jha identify 55 attributes responsible for impacting performance on such projects, which are then presented to Indian construction professionals in a questionnaire. The authors perform a statistical analysis of the results, and they then draw conclusions to help project professionals focus on a few specific factors in order to attain optimum results rather than giving attention to all factors and attaining disproportionate results.

“Bayesian Updating Application into Simulation in the North Edmonton Sanitary Trunk Tunnel Project”: Long-term repetitive projects such as tunnel construction provide opportunities to fine-tune simulation models’ approximations based on input from actual project progress. Chung, Mohamed, and AbouRizk present a case study where Bayesian techniques were applied to a simulation model of an actual tunnel project. The paper describes and evaluates the usefulness in employing such techniques in relation to improvement in the quality of projections.