Editor’s Note

“Construction Litigation for the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command, 1982–2002”: A study by authors Kilian and Gibson analyzes cases of construction litigation involving the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command for the period 1982–2002. The study provides trend data for all “first time” construction litigation cases brought before the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals over the $21\text{-}\text{year}$ span. Primary causes and subjective analysis of the “root” causes are extracted from a random sample of the total population of cases. Findings and recommendations based on root causes, including specific recommendations, are provided for the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command as well as practitioners in other organizations.

“The Effects of Delivery Systems on Change Order Size and Frequency in Mechanical Construction”: Understanding that design–build delivery methods can potentially help minimize change orders on construction projects, Riley, Diller, and Kerr perform a study to examine closely the effects of delivery methods on the frequency and magnitude of change orders in mechanical construction. The authors also use the study to examine how design–build business practices can be used to minimize the frequency of field-generated change orders. The study assesses 598 change orders occurring on 120 construction projects performed by the same contractor.

“Financial Risk Analysis of Project Finance in Indonesian Toll Roads”: Wibowo and Kochendörfer identify, quantify, and evaluate major financial risks associated with project-financed toll road projects in Indonesia. Ordering payments by priority level, subject to cash availability, enables risk to be evaluated from the different perspectives of multiple parties involved. The paper makes use of Latin Hypercube simulations for risk analysis because they deal with problems involving large and complex systems. To better illustrate the concept, a case study is presented.

“Managing Owner’s Risk of Contractor Default”: Al-Sobiei, Arditi, and Polat present a study to provide owners with a decision-making mechanism that will free them from automatically taking the typical “transfer the risk to a surety” option and will allow them to make intelligent and economical decisions that include retaining or avoiding the risk of contractor default. The methodology involves using artificial neural network and genetic algorithm training strategies to predict the risk of contractor default.

“Success of Supplier Alliances for Capital Projects”: In recent years, several supplier alliances have been successfully implemented on energy sector capital projects leading to initial price savings in the range from 6 to 10%. Harper and Bernold present the results of a study to assess the opportunities and barriers with such partnerships. Most surprisingly, very few companies use metrics to measure performance, thus they are often unable to assess how well an alliance worked or why it failed.

“An Exact Algorithm for Solving Project Scheduling Problems under Multiple Resource Constraints”: Jiang and Shi present a new algorithm, named enumerative branch-and-cut procedure (EBAC), for minimizing the total project duration of a construction project under multiple resource constraints based on an enumeration tree. EBAC generates new branches to the tree corresponding to “better” feasible alternatives. The algorithm has been tested with a set of 110 scheduling problems that have been widely used for validating a variety of schedule algorithms over the last $20\text{years}$ . Supporting its effectiveness, EBAC can obtain the shortest project durations for all of the 110 problems.

“Technical Knowledge Consolidation Using TRIZ”: The diversity and accumulation of technical knowledge on an organizational level contributes to company profitability and growth. Mohamed and AbouRizk discuss a new approach for extracting, consolidating, and then retrieving technical construction knowledge that builds on the contradiction resolution concepts of the theory of inventive problem solving. The approach is used to extract knowledge from a number of lessons learned describing technical construction problems encountered by a major construction company, of which the outcomes of the knowledge extraction and accumulation process are discussed.

“Chance-Constrained Time-Cost Trade-off Analysis Considering Funding Variability”: Yang proposes a chance-constrained programming model to incorporate the variability of funding. The proposed model formulates feasibility as a stochastic constraint, transforms it into a deterministic equivalent at a predetermined confidence level, and solves the system by means of classical optimization techniques. The time-cost curve generated by the proposed model serves as a foundation for optimizing total project cost.

“Crew Production Rates for Contract Time Estimation: Bent Footing, Column, and Cap of Highway Bridges”: In estimating construction time, O’Connor and Huh point out that few parameters are more significant than work item crew production rates and factors significantly affecting the rates. A standardized data collection tool was used to acquire a total of 93 data points from 22 ongoing Texas highway projects between February 2002 and May 2004 for four selected critical work items: footing, column-rectangle, column-round, and cap. Findings from this study are intended to enable highway agencies to enhance accuracy of contract time estimation for highway bridge construction.

“Differences in Occupational Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities among Hispanic and non-Hispanic Construction Workers”: Recently, the increase in the Hispanic population in the United States has enabled the construction industry to meet its workforce demands. Using data from several government surveys, Goodrum and Dai perform a study to examine the relative differences in injuries, illnesses, and fatalities between Hispanic and non-Hispanic construction workers by occupation. The findings show that differences in the former categories do exist between Hispanic and non-Hispanic workers, but not always unfavorably toward Hispanics.

“Viability of Designing for Construction Worker Safety”: Research studies have identified the design aspect of projects as being a significant contributing factor to construction site accidents. Designing to eliminate or avoid hazards prior to exposure on the jobsite is also listed as the top priority in the hierarchy of controls common to the safety and health professions, but widespread implementation of the concept is lacking due to perceived industry and project barriers. Gambatese, Behm, and Hinze present a pilot study that was conducted to investigate the practice of addressing construction worker safety when designing a project and to determine the feasibility an practicality of such intervention.