ICCREM 2015: Environment and the Sustainable Building

The increasing industrialization and standardization of construction opens up for the field of design automation, and possibilities to work with several what-if-conditions and several product candidates instead of just one or two during design. Design automation applications for building component and infrastructural part design are starting to appear using software from the manufacturing industry. A challenge is however to develop such construction design automation applications since comprehensive methodologies are missing. MOKA is a methodology for developing knowledge-based engineering (KBE) applications originating from the aerospace and automotive industries. KBE is a label for computer-based automation of routine design tasks. This paper describes methodologies for developing design automation applications in construction, compares these with the MOKA methodology, and discusses the opportunities and challenges of having a KBE methodology for construction.

The existing health buildings in the Gaza Strip hospitals lack of adequate maintenance. This is due to several reasons, such as lack of funding, lack of qualified well trained staff, and lack of staff motivation. Most public hospital buildings are in poor conditions. The aim of this paper is to present a case study regarding the maintenance of the obstetrics and gynecology building in Al-Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip. It was observed that the old age building, high occupancy of patients, and lack of periodic maintenance resulted in many problems in the building, such as water leakages through cracks, corrosion of pipes, wet areas in walls and ceilings, and medical gases installation. Corrective maintenance action was used in this case such as removing the existing network pipes and install new one, painting pipes, construct internal walls and ceilings. Several advantages were resulted from the maintenance of this building such as providing healthier place for patients, changing many rooms’ functions for better use, and increasing the capacity of building to receive more patients. This has led to a better health care services and improved patients’ recovery.

The environmentally and socially sensitive nature of construction activities calls for properly implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) industry wide. Although CSR maps out the scope that business can contribute to the welfare of a wider community, few efforts have been put to its fulfillment on a construction site. The study presented in this paper proposes a framework for embedding CSR in the construction process with the intention of contributing to the attainment of sustainability. Research methods including case study and literature review were employed to interpret the suitability of embedding CSR in the construction process. Interview with professionals were thereafter conducted and based on the interview results, a conceptual framework for embedding CSR in the construction process was given. It is found that the connection between CSR and the construction process has not been aware of popularly in the industry. Although recent years have witnessed the widening popularity of CSR in construction, little attention has been drawn to CSR fulfillment on a construction site. The research findings shed some lights on CSR implementation in the area of sustainable construction.

Work environment safety can be enhanced by effective construction site layout planning (CSLP). The majority researches works on CSLP focused on developing different algorithms and program to generate site layout alternatives under the single objective function of cost. However, site safety should be considered under the different facilities layout in the construction site. The paper proposed a safety model to design a site layout in terms of the multiple objective functions of safety level and safety cost. In order to solve the multiple objective optimization problems, ACO algorithm was used to find the trade-off solution. The results show that the proposed model is promising.

External orientation of strategy management accounting provided a means of releasing management accounting from the factory floor and gives a chance for inter-organizational cost management (IOCM) improvement. Although there haven’t definite meaning of SMA, but several general methods of SMA is becoming more popular than any time, such as value chain analysis, strategy cost management, competitor analysis. A model of IOCM is proposed under SMA framework, on which depended SMA techniques and special strategy cost drivers. After analyzing existing methods and elements of IOCM, the paper analyzed an IOCM implementation framework based on product and relation driver’s dimensions. Under product life cycle dimensions, IOCM adopt techniques such as Target costing and kaizen in different production phase. Under relation driver dimensions, three practices including FPQ, ICI, CCM is discussed for inter-organizational cost reduction.

According to experience of reconstruct the old factory buildings, old villages and old towns in Guangdong Province in China. This paper defines what the comprehensive benefit of the Reconstruction of old factory buildings, old villages, and old towns is. Second, From the angle of view for sustainable development, an index system framework of comprehensive benefit was constructed, involving the index system for Political benefits and the index system for environmental benefits, economy and social benefits after reconstruction. The index system provided theoretical basis for evaluating the reconstruction of old factory buildings, old villages and old towns, and also supplied references for mode of the reconstruction.

In order to strengthen the engineering control and ensure the realization of project and quality, the construction supervision system is introduced from aboard as a kind of engineering supervision and management system in China. This article contains analysis on present situation of the construction engineering supervision and existed problems. Construction supervision industry response and development measures are proposed mainly from the seven aspects including policies and regulations, industry regulation, the bidding mode, supervision business entrust contract model, the scientific construction of supervision relationship, and the industry development environment improvement. It aims to improve the engineering supervision level, develop the effect of engineering supervision, and ensure engineering construction.

Lean thinking is an effective method to reduce or eliminate the waste in the life cycle of construction projects and improve the projects’ productivity. It is more and more widely used in the construction industry. This paper takes lean construction as the theoretical basis. Management philosophy of lean construction was analyzed. The impact of workflow on construction projects efficiency, including workflow continuity and loss during the flow process, was elaborated. According to the characteristics of earthmoving activities, the earthmoving operations workflow model was proposed based on lean construction to specify dynamic changes of workflow and information flow in the construction process. The main influencing factors and constraint conditions for earthmoving operations were discussed. The proposed models can be used to adjust the construction process, maximize the resources allocation, and reduce the resource loss and waste in construction in order to improve the efficiency and productivity for construction projects.

Construction projects’ overrun of deadline and budget with reduced quality of the end-product is a challenge which academics, politicians, and construction parties have become more aware of. The objective of this research is to review if factors affect public construction projects’ time, cost and quality significantly different between different public construction agencies. The study was initiated by literature review and expert interviews, which lead to identification of 26 factors. A questionnaire was afterwards sent to the full Danish population of publicly employed project managers. The principal findings demonstrate that factors affecting time, cost and quality to a large extent do not differ significantly between the studied organizations. However, a significant difference between factors impact at time, cost and quality was established in the following post-hoc analysis. The conclusion is thus consequently, that the identified factors largely affect non-significantly different between organizations.

In China, common quality fault control of construction manual is widely accepted for solving quality fault. However, the present manner to solve different types of quality faults requires extracting useful information manually, it is time-consuming, lacking efficiency and prone to error. To conquer the problems, this paper presents a model of ontology-based common quality fault of construction. In the proposed model, control manual of common quality fault of construction is selected as main knowledge source, and extracted hierarchy and relationship of context information from the knowledge source is represented by ontology model. A reasoning framework presented in this paper leverages ontology for structuring knowledge about phenomenon, reason, precautions and improvement measure of quality during construction. Based on inputted quality fault a reasoning mechanism is put forward to identify fault’s phenomenon, inference corresponding reason, precautions and improvement measure. And the quality fault ontology is validated by case study. Finally, the limitations of the proposed method and future research directions are discussed.

This paper is to discuss the correlation between the trend of proportion of construction industry output value in Guangdong province, gross product of construction industry and Guangdong’s GDP base on statistical data of 1989–2012. What is more, this paper measures the construction industry’s contribution to the provincial economic using industry contribution model combining their trend of rate of increase. The result shows that, although the supporting function of construction industry lag behind relatively, yet the construction industry promote other industries’ development hugely which means that the construction industry has significant influence on Guangdong’s overall economy. The contribution index of construction industry, is merely 0.3701, shows that the contribution of construction industry presents a negative state. We suggest that the government should take a series of related measures which can provide good macroscopic development environment for construction and improve the level of the development of construction industry, in order to encourage the construction industry make more contribution for the province’s overall economic.

On account of many unpredictable factors, modification of contract during project construction is almost inevitable. At present, the contract modification management is inefficiency, leading to high change frequency and high cost. In this paper, a simulation model of stochastic petri nets systems is built to analyze the contract modification process of construction project, current process of mechanical and electrical installation contract modification in Guangzhou metro is taken as a case study. According to quantitative analysis and simulation results, this paper finds that the bottleneck problems of modification process lay in these three areas: modification files writing by construction organization, supervising engineer’s review, and sponsoring department’s review. Taking the average process efficiency into consideration, we suggest that optimized objects and factors focus on sponsoring department who should improve the efficiency of approval process in change review meetings and timely adjustments for changes in cost, to improve management lever of metro construction.

The construction and operation of buildings account for a significant part of the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Most design approaches to reduce the use of energy are focusing on the operational phase of a building’s life. Consequently, the embodied energy from the upstream flow, including production of building material and components, transport and assembly on-site, is often disregarded in the development of energy-efficient buildings. The purpose of this research is to propose a method to facilitate the assessment of the embodied energy and carbon footprint during the design and planning stage from the production of building material and components including the transportation to site. The framework makes use of environmental product declaration (EPD) and supply chain information stored in a relational database of building materials and components, building information models (BIM) for the assessment of the embedded energy in the building. Further, the feature manipulation engine (FME) is used to track transportation distances and transportation times from Google Map (GM) for the assessment of embedded energy from supplier to the construction site. Finally, a prototype is developed to demonstrate the practical application of the framework and to observe possible limitations and barriers.

The promoting of housing industrialization makes the huge change of production mode in housing construction in China. Housing component, as an important means of promoting housing industrialization and the production in construction sector, gets more and more attention. New information and communication technologies (ICT) have stimulated change and modernization of traditional working methods, especially in the areas of building information modeling (BIM) and e-business. The products online trading has become an important means of consumption in people’s daily life. How to find the needed products rapidly and accurately online, which is the first important problem to solve in e-business. This paper presents a research on housing component searching in e-business environment using BIM. It analyzes the information classification and search method of housing component, and focus on the influence of BIM on the housing component online searching.

This paper, with the help of GIS, aims to build a spatial data model which includes the top three hospitals, education facilities and parks. By the buffer analysis and overlay analysis of the time cost of the passage, education facilities of primary and secondary schools as well as several park services, this paper tries to discuss the characters of their spatial arrangement. Meanwhile, taking the main urban areas of Nanchang City as example, following conclusions can firmly be drawn: (a) Public service scope is mainly around the old town, which is overlaying seriously. (b) Due to the shortage of park resources in Nanchang City, the service scope is quite limited. (c) Districts, like north of the Qingshanhu district and Honggutan district, are lack of public service, which has caused the inequality of the public service. This paper provides some reference for the planning of public resource and old town.

Safety is a basic requirement as well as a difficult problem. Although Chinese contractors grow fast and become more professional, they never feel relaxed to ensure safety and avoid accidents, because construction market and project environment also change. Contractors who only use instinct and experiences cannot manage safety issues well. Rather, they should establish a safety management system and apply it in all projects. This paper attempted to develop a model of contractors’ safety management system, for that, an expert interview was conducted. First, the authors revealed defects of contractors’ safety management in present. Some defects were mentioned in literatures and agreed by a large number of experts, while some were newly discovered through this survey. These defects need special concern from contractors. Then, the authors proposed corresponding measurements for defects from three view angles, namely, safety culture, regular safety programs, and cooperation mechanisms. The safety management system and related measurements can provide a reference for contractors.

Considering the application status of online reviews in the real estate industry, this paper mainly discusses the significance of online reviews for cyber marketing in the industry based on existing theoretical studies. Additionally, reasons of why online reviews are not further applied in real estate as in other industries are analyzed. Finally, several suggestions on effective utilization of online reviews to promote real estate online marketing are also given in this paper.

This paper summarized systematically present situation and problems of the construction management professional qualifications set-up and exam management mechanism in China, as well as analyzed the knowledge and skill feature for various construction management certificated qualifications which are of knowledge relation in detail. As for these problems, based on the conception of knowledge integration of complete life cycle management of construction projects, this paper has proposed a definite operating scheme to reduce the current quantity of exams for certifications of construction management qualifications and to reform the examination and management of professional qualifications at present.

With the continuous expansion of construction project scale, gradual enhancement of construction technical content, and increasingly intensifying scope of multi-project management of construction enterprises, it has become a problem that must be considered in safety management at construction site of construction industry to realize real-time, whole-process and uninterrupted safety monitoring by utilizing modern information technology and optimizing monitoring means. A construction monitoring system is designed in this paper by studying hazard sources at construction site, so as to identify, control, manage and prevent hazard sources, to grasp dynamic conditions at construction site, to promote safety management of construction site, and to improve the informatization level of project monitoring.

According to the management problem of green building materials and BIM advantages under the background of the development of green building, the green building materials management system was framed based on BIM, combing with life cycle assessment theory, and at last safety monitoring management system with RFID and BIM of construction site was built. This study shows that, the BIM technology advantages and the building materials features fit well, the safety monitoring management system achieves the real-time visualization, information automation, and multi-collaborative participation, which can effectively promote the development of green building.

With the further development of the research on construction supply chain management theory, it has become one of the main content about construction supply chain management to evaluate its performance objectively and accurately based on its characteristics. This paper studies and discusses the theory and methods of construction supply chain management by combining the supply chain management which is an advanced management mode and the characteristics of construction industry. And then we construct the comprehensive performance evaluation indexes system of integrated construction supply chain for the research status of construction supply chain performance evaluation. The indexes system can assist the quantitative analysis for the integrated construction supply chain performance evaluation. This paper provides support for the implementation of supply chain performance evaluation, aiming at the purpose of reducing the construction supply chain costs.

This paper briefly introduces the concept of BIM5D technology and its application status of Chinese construction industry, which is in association with the practical general contracting management experience concerning with more than 20 BIM demonstration construction projects encompassing Guangzhou Chow Tai Fook Finance Center (Guangzhou East Tower), Guangzhou Zhujiang Newtown J2-5 parcel office buildings, Guiyang Zhongtian Weilaifangzhou (Future Ark), and Dongguan Vanke Residential Industrialization Base that are under our firm’s construction. Specifically, the paper discusses the guiding function of BIM application based on Glodon BIM5D platform encompassing collision check, deepening design, drawing management, engineering quantity calculation, simulation scheme, schedule management, and cost management over general contracting management. Also, some suggestions have been given for future BIM application.

To improve the management efficiency of existing urban building and reduce the incidence of accidents, this paper analyzes and designs the safety management information system of existing urban building. First of all, the object-oriented method is utilized to analyze the data structure of the spatial and attribute data, which are related to the construction safety. Second of all, the framework of the safety management information system of existing urban building is designed from the perspective of the integration of the system and the GIS service. The system structure, database, function module, key technology, safety early warning system and etc. are studied here. Based on the safety management information system of existing urban building, the intelligent management of buildings is promoted. Meanwhile, it provides a brand new idea for the information construction of urban buildings.

The misuse (including nonuse) of personal protective equipment (PPE) directly catalyzes the changes from incidents to critical accidents and diseases. The main control over PPE use is visual inspections, which is time-consuming and its effectiveness depends largely on the observer’s safety knowledge and experience, which often results in omissions or bias. To solve this problem, this study introduces a novel approach towards automated remote monitoring and assessing how the PPEs are worn. The real time location system (RTLS) and virtual construction are developed for worker’s location tracking to decide whether the worker should wear helmet and give a warning, while the silicone single-point sensor is designed to show whether the PPE is used properly for further behavior assessment. The process of data synchronization and fusion of location coordinates and pressure data is described in detail and the system is tested in an open area experiment to prove its feasibility.

Schedule has affirmed the importance of construction management study, which has decision meaning for advance the modern engineering construction management. Challenge in these settings pertains to the need to cooperate the schedules with modeling by using BIM theory, so that the most of construction resources capacity is fully committed. To probe into these critical factors, this study will analyze the effects of construction schedule and collaborate it, so as to speed up construction information management. Our central contribution is to illuminate how schedule can cooperate with modeling based on BIM theory and help us to management.

Building information model (BIM) is considered as a promising means to facilitate the application of precast concrete (PC). Ordinary BIMs involve the information on geometry, materials, manufacturing details, quantities and so on, which are determined after designing. However, the component details and mechanical behaviors of PC structures, which are usually ignored in the BIM during designing, could profoundly affect the final structural forms. In this paper, several different precast beam-to-column connections applied in China were modeled as the basic components with BIM software, and similar precast moment-resisting frame models were designed with these connections meeting requirements of building codes. Finally they were compared in terms of quantity and total cost. Conclusions came that it was important to build the structural system library of PC including the information of component details and mechanical behaviors in BIM.

When E-Commerce and building information modeling can be used together, it will produce a new mode of self-help house decoration. This paper systematically analyses the disadvantages of the traditional house decoration and introduces the self-help house decoration mode, including its implementation process and structure framework. Than it analyses the new decoration mode and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the mode, finally, try to find solutions to overcome the obstacles in realizing it.

Within a complex and volatile construction context, a real time safety monitoring method featured by solving management retard problem is in need for effective prevention and control of onsite accidents. This paper aims on analyzing critical safety factors performed by hand-held construction tools and onsite labor behaviors, establishing man–tool safety management indicators system, and using neural network model to assess safety indicators (except the Boolean-type indicators). Meanwhile based on onsite safety inspection procedures, the neural network safety decision-making model is integrated with RFID technology so that five subsystems (respectively man–tool identification subsystem, safety status information transmission subsystem, real time inspection subsystem, information management subsystem and safety alert subsystem) constitute a complete man–tool monitoring and management system, as to ensure accuracy and efficiency of onsite safety management.

In the field of construction project, collaborative management has been paid more and more attention by all the participants. Compared with the traditional way, BIM has lots of advantages in collaborative management. The paper first analyzes that BIM is how to realize collaborative management in the whole life cycle of construction project, including the collaborative management of planning stage, design stage, construction stage, operation stage, the different participants and professions of construction project. And then, it analyzes the advantages of collaborative management based on BIM technology in construction project.

Construction waste has been a prominent problem throughout the world, causing depletion of landfill space, the resource waste and environmental problems. In view of current background of the rapid reduction of non-renewable resources and the huge energy consumption in construction industry, based on the theory of material cycle, this paper has made a detailed study on recycling of C&D waste. To do so, we analyzed the components of the construction waste recycling system, summarized recycle process that consist of pre-sorting, reuse directly or regeneration, established a construction and demolish waste recycling system. Who involve in the recycle process? What type of products can be reuse directly and what type of products should pre-sort and regeneration. How to maximize the use of waste and improve resource utilization? These three issues form the main content of this article.

Nowadays, green construction has been an important means in science and technology work and enterprise management. This paper introduces a system of technological innovation in China Construction Fourth Engineering Division Corp. Ltd, which promotes the realization of green construction. In recent years, the company has identified the control targets of green construction, in the meanwhile, actively developed and applied technology, such as the plastic template, steel road, chamber room, plastic fence, board-support combination, BIM management, cold method for the fabrication of protective facilities, waste recycling, and eco-friendly multifunctional concrete, all of which have achieved environmental and economic benefits, and enhanced the quality and efficiency of enterprise management.

This article analyzed the operation mechanism, the developments situation and the existing problems of green construction from the aspects of policies, regulations, standards codes, construction technologies and engineering practices points of views. It also revealed the effectiveness of green construction for lower resources consumption, reducing pollution and protecting environments. The author proposed that new development trend of green construction based on the background of new urbanization, and recommended progress for accelerating the development of green construction. In the architectural industry, green architecture is the exactly how the idea of sustainable development is put into practice. In fact, green construction remains a very important process for producing the green architectural products. Earlier in this century, following the reach of consensus over the concept of “Green Olympics”, the architectural industry entered the new era dominated by the concept of green construction.

More and more attention has paid to the greenhouse gas around the world. It has been a problem for each country to reduce the carbon emissions, so it is with China. Carbon emissions in building products accounts for a large share in the whole emissions from all aspects. Therefore, the building industry is reckoned highly energy consuming. It is significant to calculate the carbon emissions of buildings to find solutions. This paper establish a calculate model, which is also applied in a case study in local, to calculate the carbon emissions of buildings in the whole life cycle, including material preparation, construction installation, operation, and abandonment phase. Hence, the result of this study can be of reference on the reduction measures taken in different stages in the life cycle.

Recent years, much more attention has been paid to green data centers for their high energy consumption, high emission and growing market demand. The paper studied the BREEAM and LEED systematically to explore characteristics of assessment systems for the green data centers. Then compared to the assessment versions of ordinary new constructions, BREEAM and LEED data centers adjust primarily two aspects for the energy consumption characteristic: energy indicators and weights. The conclusion with recommendations is to establish comprehensive environmental performance assessment systems for green data centers in China by setting energy indicator contents and weights, which combines with the design principles and characteristics of indicators based on Evaluation Standard for Green Building (short for ESGB, GB/T50378-2014), the Evaluation Standard for Green Building is the national green building assessment system in China.

With the idea of sustainable development is increasingly deeply rooted in the minds of people, green building has received more and more attention in the construction industry. In this paper, Hall three dimensions structure was applied to study green buildings systematically. On the time dimension, this paper stands in the view of the whole life cycle of green buildings. In order to demonstrate the knowledge dimension of green construction systems clearly and comprehensively, and provide a kind of thinking processes at the same time, a large number of literatures were reviewed to discover the theory and methodology related to each project phase of green buildings. Finally, Hall three dimensions structure model was established in this paper to contribute to the further research about the green buildings.

The rising significance of sustainable development in both international policy debate and the construction industry has triggered the emergence of increasing number of studies related to sustainability and construction corporations. How construction corporations respond to sustainability is of vital importance to enable sustainability transition of construction industries. However, there is lack of a systematic review of these studies. This paper critically reviews the existing body of knowledge on sustainability and construction corporations. Four common research themes are identified, namely corporate sustainability of construction firms, corporate social responsibility in construction firms, drivers of sustainability in construction firms, and barriers of sustainability in construction firms. It is found that the existing studies predominantly focus on providing description or explanation of the implementation situation of sustainability practices of construction firms, while largely overlook the strategies of promoting sustainability in construction firms. Future research opportunities are identified such as the relationships between sustainability and competitiveness of construction firms, and strategies of promoting sustainability in construction firms based on academic theories.

As an agricultural country, there are lots of land and people engaging in agricultural production in China, which occupy a large percentage of the total land and population. The energy consumed in village takes over forty percent of the total social energy, most of which is used in daily life. However, the energy used in village is facing the problem of poor efficiency and it is used extensively. Therefore, the improvement of the energy utilization becomes an important approach to improve the living standard of village people and the agricultural productivity. This paper analyzes the current situation of energy utilization in villages in northern China, based on the data of investigate and survey in a village there. Then, taking the village as an example, some methods are proposed to solve the problems in energy utilization.

The concept of sustainable building has been widespread in the construction industry to reduce the environmental impacts from buildings. Considering the whole life cycle of a building, design stage is crucial in deciding whether a project will be successful. Therefore, this study will propose a strategy which can optimize the building design schemes to improve their sustainability and save cost over their lifetime with help of the cooperation between building information modeling (BIM) and multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO). Case study proves that this strategy is effective and efficient, which can largely reduce the designers’ workloads and improve the building performances.

The environmental impact of construction process is closely related to the operational resource arrangement of the construction scheme. At the viewpoint of green construction, this research focuses on the onsite construction phase from the preparation to the completion and acceptance. From the perspective of ecological economics, based on emergy theory and its methodology, a comprehensive analysis on the flows of the input-output capital, energy and material is done to the construction operational resources, i.e., manpower, material, and equipment. A framework of emergy analysis is setup connecting ecological and economical system of construction process. This research has theoretical and practical reference for the innovation of rethinking construction operational resources with the sense of green construction.

The developing of building energy efficiency services market, as a key part of building energy efficiency, has been in-depth in China, but the market cultivation behavior of the government, as the main market promoter, have to be changed as a result of its function transformation reformation. In this paper, building energy efficiency services market government cultivation behavior model was set up based on the cultural construction. In this model, the disadvantages of single government cultivation behavior were analyzing and the mechanisms of cultural construction behavior of the government were researched by using game theories. The model explained that how to use culture to impact the market by the government, forming the interaction among the market, users and government, which could achieve the management aims of government, and proved that it could be one of effective government cultivation behaviors in this market.

Energy consumption due to residential building operation is a crucial issue in cold-climate regions. In order to alleviate the energy demand from residential building operation, the concept of NetZero energy homes (NZEHs) has emerged as a solution. Appropriate design of the building envelope for NZEHs, (including insulation type and thickness, configuration, and other parameters), is a key to ensuring a high level of energy performance of NZEHs, and energy simulation provides a tool to investigate the energy performance of design options for each component of the NZEH building envelope. HOT2000, which is a widely used energy simulation tool in Canada, is used for energy simulation in this research; in order to achieve the goal of simulation automation, the batch version of HOT2000 is utilized. The energy performance of design options is simulated for such main components of NZEH building envelope as main wall, exposed floor, attic, basement wall, and basement floor, and, based on the simulation results, the functions and charts of energy performance are developed for these components. This research contributes to the body of research in this area by analyzing the energy performance of design options for NZEH building envelope.

Since the Chinese construction industry has huge impacts on China’s economy, society and environment, the sustainability of this industry is very important. Scholars have explored the sustainability drivers and barriers of the Chinese construction industry, trying to help it transition to a sustainability-oriented industry. However, few of them succeeded in offering a systematic approach to respond to the complexity of the sustainability transition issue. This paper aims at introducing the multi-level perspective from the socio-technical transition research into the research field of the construction industry, to systematically analyse the sustainability transition issue of the Chinese construction industry. Based on the multi-level perspective, the drivers and barriers are assessed. The results show that various elements in the construction industry, such as the corporations, policy, technology, and culture, coevolve and have multi-dimensional interactions, and various drivers and barriers of sustainability coexist and intertwined. To facilitate the sustainability transition process, systematic instruments are needed.

With global climate change issues and the increasingly serious energy crisis, low carbon idea and green idea are penetrated into many industries. Firstly, the paper is based on the industrial agglomeration theory and industrial gradient transfer theory. Considering the current situation of green building development in China, the paper proposes to develop green building in the way of industry cluster, which is more conducive to improve the green building technology and the rate of green building. Secondly, on the basis of diamond model theory, the paper summarized the factors which affect the competitiveness of green building industry. Also, it analyses our regional green building industry qualitatively. Thirdly, the paper takes the method of empirical research. By comparing results of the cluster analysis and the mean green building amount 72 cities already have, it reaches the conclusion that cluster analysis can be used as a method of green building industry gradient division.

Tender documents are instrumental for clients to identify the extent to which contractors can undertake some predefined construction activities. By examining tender documents, this study aims to identify the practices of sustainable construction in China. A review of literatures and tender evaluation systems was conducted firstly to derive a set of sustainability performance indicators of construction process. This step was followed by interviewing professionals for validation, and 497 tender documents were collected from 30 major cities of China. The research findings indicate that whilst clients play a vital important role in formulating the rule of sustainable construction, they pay insufficient attention to both environmental and social sustainability performance. This study provides guidance for tenderers to adopt appropriate bidding strategies and shed some lights on the improvement of sustainability performance from the perspective of clients’ demand.

In the “Twelfth Five-Year” period, under the background of the construction of the new rural, green villages and China’s urbanization, for the shortage of rural infrastructure, the insufficient of public service facilities, lack of environmental protection, excessive energy consumption and many other issues, this paper establish an evaluation index system suitable for green village in the cold areas of north China through research on the village green development research status at home and abroad and the evaluation index system of ecology, sustainable development, green building and regional development. Meanwhile, the index system also can be used as the reference of the village construction of other domestic areas with similar climatic conditions.

Consumers ultimately pay for green building; therefore, consumers play a decisive role in the process of promoting green building. In order to understand consumers’ consumption propensity for green building, in this paper, we design the questionnaire based on the index system of 2014 version green building evaluation criteria released lately by China and investigate consumers’ comment on this new “standard” in Chongqing city. By analyzing the survey results, we get index and grading items which consumers believe to be important and further understand which aspects consumers pay more attention to when they buy green buildings. Finally, combined with the results, we put forward some relative suggestions on green building evaluation criteria.

In the process of urban-village reconstruction, the collective economic organizations barely participated in the negotiations of economic compensation and resettlement and other scattered stages, which had led to many conflicts unsolved. However, if rural collective economic organization and the developers can set up the company jointly, where both subjects can be involved in all stages of urban-village reconstruction. Then many problems may be solved. Based on former academic researches and practical achievements, with the normative analysis, the author proposes a new thought of the urban-village reconstruction development company, which means the rural economic organization divides the work and collaborates with developers in the process urban-village reconstruction, which can not only adequately reflect the interests of the villagers, resolve many conflicts and lift the efficiency of reconstruction, but make it easier in the resettling and the transformation of the professional roles of the villagers. The author hopes to provide a new thinking direction for other researchers and practitioners.

With continuous development in theories, public participation has become the significant legal and scientific foundation of urban and rural planning decisions. The development and popularization of new media represented by computer network and mobile network have tremendously promoted the endless emergence of public participation. This paper discusses significance of public participation in the planning and management of urban and rural areas and explores its influence on the original system of public participation in urban and rural planning. More specifically, public participation in urban planning in Shenzhen in the new media era and operating conditions are analyzed, existing problems pointed out and strategies are suggested to make the public participation system in the urban and rural planning more perfect.

Quality of life (QOL) has been an ongoing subject of discussion in the field of urban planning and development in recent decades. Measuring QOL of residents through fundamental neighborhood metrics provides information on the living conditions of citizens and helps to promote sustainable social development. This study investigates the effect of neighborhood design on the QOL of residents. The metrics used to measure the QOL include availability and accessibility to goods and services. For the this paper, Edmonton, Canada, as an example of a growing city that brings challenges for urban planners in terms of sustainable development, is chosen for the case study. The methodology underlying this contribution relies on a comparative study of four neighborhoods located in four different parts of Edmonton having similar densities. The results of this study provide further insight into land development patterns and can assist decision makers involved in urban development.

Housing industrialization has become a new way to solve current residential building problems in Chinese rural areas; however it’s a premise to take different housing industrialization measures according to different local rural conditions within China. This paper aims on analyzing critical rural economic, social and transportation factors related to housing industrialization and establishing an industrial grading indicator system. Based on these indicators, a clustering analysis using MATLAB hierarchical classification algorithm is applied to conduct the empirical study on housing industrialization in rural areas. Then, four clusters and three grading areas are generated according to this clustering analysis, which are prioritized areas, potential areas and support-required areas. Finally, the paper focuses on proposing specific implementation and design patterns for housing industrialization in graded areas, which constitutes a comprehensive decision scheme of housing industrialization in Chinese rural areas as to ensure a better and sustainable China New Countryside Planning implementation.

The institutional integration of the real estate registration and the real estate registration system building is one of the important tasks of the government institutional reform and government functional transformation recently. At present, the Ministry of Land and Resources is supervising the implementation nationwide. Under the circumstance, the present study analyzes the current situation and problems of the scattered China’s real estate registration. Within the framework of “four unifications”, i.e. the unification in real estate registration organizations, registration books, registration basis, and information platform, the present study explores the implementation of the local unified real estate registration from the perspectives of real estate registration duty integration, data integration, business process improvement and information sharing according to the actual situation in different areas. At last, it puts forward concrete suggestions for the implementation of the local unified real estate registration work.

China’s rural land issues at this stage mainly perform as circulation problems of the farmers land contract and management rights under the existing land system. The transfer of such land using rights begins with the continuous development of agriculture, and changing cultivated land dispersed crushing situation to adapt the objective needs of the strategic adjustment of agricultural structure and scale operation. In this paper, statistical yearbooks and other reference data are the main source of information, backed by the Marxist theory of property rights and land configuration market capitalization theory. The factors affecting Harbin rural land circulation are analyzed by using quantitative analysis method through the model of multiple linear regressions. Therefore, the paper comes to comparing the impact of various factors on rural land circulation. SPSS16.0 software is used for statistical modeling and quantitative analysis. Based on the successful experience of the land transfer abroad, combining the pragmatic provincial land transfer situation of Harbin, we take proper proposals for the existing problems about transfer of land in Harbin.

Sustainable urban development and land use has been a new agenda for over a decade in the world. Particularly in hyper density cities such as Hong Kong, land use conditions are more complicated and different from general large cities and the conflict between growing demand from urban development and limited land supply is more prominent. To facilitate sustainable land use in hyper density cities, this paper looks into land use conditions/characteristics in such cities by examining Hong Kong’s land use practice as a real case. Firstly, land demand and supply in Hong Kong are both analyzed. Secondly, the statutory and administrative procedures of land development and allocation are reviewed. Finally, problems in the current land use system are also identified and discussed. The findings can serve as a useful reference for specific further research on sustainable land use in compact/high density cities.

With the rapid growth of economy and urbanization of China, the demand of construction land has been increasing. Meanwhile, the urban construction land use is widespread inefficient. On the one hand, this phenomenon influenced the step of modernization to a great extent; on the other hand it caused a great waste of land resources. It is necessary to improve the urban land utilization and a method of intensive utilization of land is highly required. This study opened with an observation about the present condition of land use of Harbin, proceeded to discuss the basic characteristic and main limitation of land use in Harbin. It focuses on the selection of indicators and the establishment of the model to analyze the inner potential of land use in Harbin. And corresponding measures is suggested. Evaluation methods applied in this paper, such as the evaluation of the land use intensity and other evaluation index will provide innovative theory and reference of urban land intensive utilization potential evaluation for other developing cities.

This paper studies and designs the land resource dynamic monitoring system, which makes the work more efficient, accurate and rapid response. Firstly, the current surveying and mapping technology, computer technology, network technology and communication technology are studied to design a land resource investigation subsystem, in which the data acquisition, processing, updating and achievement management are integrated. Secondly, based on the research of the rule drive model, a more flexible and efficient method of business flow construction is designed. Finally, the system structure, database, function module, key technology and etc. of the system are studied here. Though the system proposed in this paper, the intelligent land resource dynamic monitoring is realized. Meanwhile, it provides an important technical support and a brand new idea for land resource management.

An increasingly number of disasters has occurred in our country, which is caused by several multiple elements: the significant duration growth of population, the severe environment damage, etc. Faced with such a phenomenon, to select a scientific and effective reconstruction planning is taking into account as a way to revitalize our nation following major natural disasters. The paper is constituted by three parts based on the analysis of domestic and foreign study. The first part presents us several experiences of reconstruction in Japan. The second part mainly summarizes and analyzes current situation of district reconstruction in China and points out several problems in Wenchuan and Ya’an city. The third part contains a series of improvement approaches in reconstruction planning. The paper applies new methods as well as new technology applications on reconstruction planning, such as: comparative analysis; a combination of empirical and standard analysis; urban post-disaster design; planning assessment; shelter design. post-disasters reconstruction improvement derives from the empirical analysis on preceding research, which is considered not only to make a significant contribution to urban recover but the efficient approach to impulse the national innovation.

China is now in the stage of the fast urbanization, whereas the quality of urbanization is still in a low level. Thus, it is necessary to develop an urbanization quality evaluation system to guide and rule urbanization scientifically. This paper develops a comprehensive evaluation system for measuring urbanization quality under the perspective of new-type urbanization in China. Then, taking Chongqing as a case, measuring the relative level of urbanization quality of each region in Chongqing is evaluated. It can be concluded that the urbanization quality in different regions are in wide gaps and measures proposed to resolve the issue.

With the rapid development of economy and quick urbanization, urban land will continue to expand at a rapid rate. On the one hand, it leads to a result that the layout of city industrial land, commercial land and residential land are in chaos; on the other hand, a large number of plough in suburb area loosed, in order to alleviate the city expansion speed and reduce the loss of agricultural land, this paper analyzed the present situation of land use in Harbin City, and by establishing the model and index system of intensive land use potential evaluation, calculating the index weight by AHP method. According to the related standards and the relevant research results, build a quantitative grading system of land the potential of Harbin City, obtained the intensive use comprehensive macro potential level of Harbin’s city land, and carried on the analysis of potential.

Urbanization is an inexorable trend of the human social modernization. The evolution of industrial structure and urbanization development is a complementary phenomenon. Based on the real case of industrial structure evolution in China, the process of urbanization and industrialization in China, as well as their coupling relationship, is analyzed and evaluated in this paper. Empirical analysis shows a stable relationship between the industrial development and urbanization. But no significantly causal relationship is found between them. By further analyzing Shandong province, the urbanization process is found to be slower than the industrialization process, while the gap is gradually reduced. The urbanization and industrialization process is not balanced among regions and intra-regional differences are significant. The deviation degree of urbanization and industrialization is high in the West and low in the East, which shows a ladder-like distribution.

The rapid development of information technology has brought the era of “big data”, which changes the research on urban spatial organization and structure. On the basis of the studies on traditional urban space research method, this paper analyzed the big data processing technology and summarized the studies on urban functional area and social space using big data concept all over the world, including the aspects of urban traffic, function zoning, behavior characteristics, social relations, urban planning and some major events. All these studies should be have provide new insights in understanding the inter-relationship between the human and geographical environment which is establishing a new urban spatial research system based on big data applications at present. It is helpful for the interdisciplinary studies on city development and also better for guiding the urban planning for innovation on smart city construction.

Our planet’s resources are limited, how to conserve natural resources is an urgent problem. The construction industry is energy-consuming, it relates to water, timber, minerals, and many other resource consumptions. Related statistics show that nearly half of the resources that people get from nature are used in the construction industry and the construction of ancillary facilities (Gottfried and Malik 2009). Meanwhile, the construction industry is also highly polluting industry and the broken of natural resources is shocking, so energy conservation is an important object. In modern society, many countries are seeking to develop a low-carbon economy and circular economy, striving to get the maximum benefits. The researches of the low-carbon-saving building can develop a low-carbon economy and circular economy, but also benefit future generations. Tianjin is the first city to study the carbon-saving buildings and constructions of energy-saving city, its constructions of low-carbon energy-efficient buildings always walk in the forefront of our country. For example, the financial district named Jiabao and community service centers named Beitang are Tianjin’s low-carbon energy-efficient building landmark projects. This article briefly describes the main low-carbon energy-efficient buildings in Tianjin status and the concepts and construction techniques of carbon-saving building constructions.

At the background of the new socialist countryside, there is an urgent need of the rural construction standard system to guide and restrict the development of villages and town. For now, the rural construction system is under the state of construction, there are so many problems such as the original standards lag in the rural construction, the lack of implementation of new technology platform, the development of the China’s energy-saving construction and the ecological protection and so on. These all have an urgent need for the rural construction standard system. This paper is based on the Petri net, divide the rural construction standard system into three dimensions to describe and analyze the construction of rural construction standard system. Finally, the establishment process scheme of the rural construction standard system is given.

In the future, urban village will be a sort of irreplaceable resource for sustainable urban development in China. With great amount of resources invested into urban village reconstruction, selecting some villages with advantages to be reconstructed is urgently necessary. After comprehensively analyzing the influencing factors of reconstruction, this paper builds a comprehensive evaluation system of urban village reconstruction ability, with 14 indexes from three aspects: the basic situation of urban villages, asset size of villages and social demands. By the mean-squared deviation method, this paper calculates the index weight and the comprehensive level of the reconstruction ability of several Guangzhou urban villages. Then by the cluster analysis with SPSS software, the villages are compartmentalized into 8 grades. This paper also gives some further countermeasures on the issue to cater to the need of sustainable urban development.

The article chose spatial performance as the aspect of performance problem of the city. By discriminating the theoretical foundation of city performance connotation, the article attempted to construct a theoretical framework and index system of city space performance evaluation. The evaluation system is decomposed into economic, social structure, resources and environment, space and system innovation performance. The article evaluated the space performance of 35 main cities in China from 2003 to 2013, and focused on the impact of the trend, factors and dynamical mechanism in the process of the development of the Northeast four major center cities.

The problem of the contractors and sub-contractors cash flow is mainly due to delayed payment and nonpayment which can severely affect the implementation and performance of any project. The objectives of this study are to identify the causes of delayed payment and nonpayment issues in construction projects in Gaza Strip from subcontractors’ perspective; to study the reaction of subcontractors towards payment problems; and to study the subcontractors’ opinion on effective remedies to delayed payments. A questionnaire survey was adopted to elicit the perception of subcontractors concerning payment problems. The findings of this study indicated that most subcontractors encountered delayed payment and nonpayment from the main contractors. Delayed variation orders payment was found as the most frequently problem faced by subcontractors which has led to disputes. The results revealed that most disputes were resolved through negotiation. The average time that was taken to resolve the disputes was less than 3 months. The findings showed that the inclusion of the arbitration clause in the contract is the most important effective remedy to solve the payment and dispute issues in construction projects in Gaza Strip. The findings from this study would be valuable for all construction professionals.

The number of mega construction and infrastructure (MCI) projects has increased exponentially in China over the past two decades as a result of the outstanding economic achievement and rapid urbanization development. However, projects of that size are commonly beset with performance paradox. Relationship management has been increasingly recognized as a key for improving the outcomes of construction projects by developing and implementing various related tools, such as relational contracting, partnering schemes, and strategic alliance. Given that good relationships amongst project parties is crucial to project success as Guanxi plays an essential role in Chinese societies and businesses, this study aims to develop a systematic and pragmatic framework for evaluating relationship management practice in Chinese MCI projects in terms of its maturity. This study will be conducted as part of a key program funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Mixed methodology, including interviews, survey, and case studies, will be employed to identify the critical factors for and their relative importance in good relationship management to formulate a unified and pragmatic evaluation framework. Furthermore, the developed framework will be used to evaluate the status of relationship management in MCI projects based on case studies of selected projects. Findings of this study will be beneficial to promote relationship-based collaboration and improve the outcomes of MCI projects.

Quality management is one of the most essential topics in the construction industry. Cause and effect (CE) analysis is one of the tools and techniques for quality management, and is widely used in construction quality management practices for identifying all possible causes associated with a particular problem. CE analysis requires participation and brainstorming of domain experts and experienced practitioners; however, such a brainstorming session is usually time-consuming and cumbersome, making the CE analysis process inefficient. Therefore, an ontology-based representation model is proposed in this paper that can be applied to organize experts and practitioners’ CE analysis knowledge as an ontology to benefit the reutilization of the knowledge. A case study is performed to demonstrate how the model works and can benefit the brainstorming session of a CE analysis process as well as the limitations of the model. Further studies on incorporating an automated reasoning mechanism into the model, including its implementation and advantages, are briefly discussed as well in this paper.

Construction schedule overruns are not uncommon on construction projects world over and the South African construction industry has not escaped the challenges of failing to deliver projects on time. In order to find mitigation measures of schedule overruns, the first step is to identify the causes of these overruns. Therefore, this paper assesses the causes of construction projects schedule overruns in the South African construction industry, a case of the Gauteng Province. The data used in this paper were derived from both primary and secondary sources. The secondary data was collected via a detailed review of related literature. The primary data was collected through a structured questionnaire which was distributed to construction professionals, who include: Architects, quantity surveyors, civil engineers, construction mangers and project managers. Data received from the questionnaires was analyzed using descriptive statistics procedures. Findings from the study revealed that slowness in decision making process, reworks due to errors during construction, delay in approving major changes in the scope of work, delay in material delivery, shortage of skilled equipment operators, low productivity level of workers, delay in obtaining permits from municipalities and workers risky behavior on sites were the major causes of construction projects schedule overruns in Gauteng, South Africa. The study contributes to the body of knowledge on the subject of the causes of construction project schedule overruns in Gauteng, South Africa.

The construction project is system engineering. It has its inherent laws because of the system engineering, so it need through not only the suitable management mode and management process, but also combine with the appropriate management method and management techniques to achieve. That is to say construction project need organization mode of specialized in engineering project management service. The management mode is introduced in this paper which commonly used in project management, and the advantages and disadvantages are analyzed. Finally, new ideas and proposals are put forward for its application in practice, which can be used for the engineering project management personnel for reference on the choice of organization structure mode.

Modern information technology is the foundation for construction enterprises to implement information management, and informatization management of construction enterprises is the extensive application of information technology in management of their activities, informatization management of construction enterprises entails extensive application of information technology in the management of their activities, in which modern information technology plays a major role, including computer technology, network technology, information management system and decision support system. This paper introduces a comprehensive project management system (CPMS) of China Construction Fourth Engineering Division Corp. Ltd (CCFED). With demand analyses of the system structure and business modules and a description of system design, the priority of this paper has been given to the way in which CCFED conducts “collaborative horizontal management to all sides” and “multi-stage vertical control to all ends” in the full-life cycle of modern construction project (MCP) based on CPMS. In the end, the paper is concluded with measures of improving and optimizing the system in order to achieve better application effects.

The purpose of this study is to identify the key strategies used by economic agents during the real estate development where government’s regulation and control policy introduces or not reward and punishment mechanism. Using the methods of extensive-form game and game tree, this paper analyzes economic agents’ behaviors, decisions and results, thus identifies the key strategies in the process of real estate development. Results from this study indicate that while government’s regulation and control policy fails to introduce the reward and punishment mechanism, most decisions made by the economic agents are in the case of local government and developers’ rent-seeking; otherwise, economic agents’ decision-making are under normal condition. As a consequence, to legalize the process of real estate development and help the economic agents’ healthy operation, it is imperative for government’s regulation and control policy to introduce reward and punishment mechanism.

Policy networks theory has been used a lot to analyze concrete policy in western countries and many Chinese scholars also try to interpret policy networks theory. Till now, most of the Chinese scholars focus on how policy network was organized and what’s the function of those actors. There is less research about how the actors’ interaction process affects the policy outcomes. The authors regard policy network as a multi-actor game, policy making process is the process that actors keep on interacting with each other. They use the Three Gorges Dam project as a case; to analyze the whole policy making process and they try to find what factors affect the actors decision and why it take so long to make the final decision. The authors conclude that besides external factors, like war, culture revolution, two other major factors inside the policy networks cause the delay of the decision making process.

The techniques and tools from traditional project management theory, which are prompted to enhance project performance are not as that they were before. Project governance has gradually become a new important approach to improve project performance. Many research have been conducted for project governance from different perspectives. This paper reviews and summarizes the existing literatures. Then discussion is made from three aspects: contractual governance, relational governance and the relationship between them. The definition of key concepts, research methods and the limits in existing literatures is listed out especially. Future research direction is suggested finally. The studies in China are mentioned specially. Because China has a very large scale of construction market and the relation is a very important factor that must be considered during project stages.

According to development and needs of construction industry in China, the conception of Smart Construction Theory is illustrated. In the paper, questionnaire survey is used to collect data needed for analysis, as an effective method. And then the structure of AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) projects information management model was concisely described. Furthermore, the paper takes cost management function to reason by analogy other functions of the model, and smart cost management is proposed. The research takes cost management function to reason by analogy other functions of the model, and is an implementation example of construction project information management model. The cost management problem could be solved with dynamic programming method. The research strengthens and optimizes information management of AEC projects and improves the efficiency and competitiveness of construction industry in China.

Currently the organizational project management capacity in EPC project has become more and more concerned. The focus of the project management capacity is about a dynamic process that improves the organization and coordination, and enhances the scientific and standardized degree in project management. Evaluation of project management is the foundation for improving the project management capabilities for organization. The project management maturity model (PMMM) is proposed in this context to evaluation project management maturity of the hydropower EPC contractor. By the PMMM and combining with the specific characteristics and the current study situation hydropower project management at home and abroad, here we built a maturity framework and the evaluation system for hydropower EPC contractor on project management. And propose the evaluation method based on gray comprehensive evaluation. The empirical analysis of the EPC contract practices in SOPLADORA hydropower project shows that it is feasible and effective to analyze the maturity of the management.

According to related data, China has been turning into an aging society since 2000, which keeps aggravating bolstered by the sixth Census. In the long run, the population of potential house owners will maintain decreasing, which reduces house purchasing demand and raises the hazard of financial turmoil of real estate industry. Thus, great negative impact might occur in economy, since the financial risks of real estate in china are highly concentrated in the banking system. By establishing the model in demand of population of distinct ages with related data, we analyze the hidden jeopardy of real estate financial risk brought by aging in this article. To make the potential financial issues better resolved in real estate, practicable schemes are proposed as well.

Although construction accidental insurance (CAI) is mandatory in China, the really holding rate is under 30%. The reason of low purchasing rate and deficiencies of CAI remain unexplored. Our analysis shows employment size, the attitude of the proprietors and turbulence of the business cycle influence the prevalence of CAI. The deficiencies of CAI result in inefficient protection for farmer-labors. Compared to the deficiencies of CAI, construction multiemployer health insurance (CMHI) is an efficient and effective way to provide security for farmer-labors. It can stimulate the holding of health insurance by exploiting cross-firm economies of scale in the purchase of health insurance services. And multiemployer health insurance contain cross-employer portable health benefits that do not require second probation period when labor enroll another employer after leaving, at the same time it cover spells of unemployment. Additionally, construction multiemployer health insurance is a beneficial supplement for the construction accident insurance in China.

In this paper, with the fault tree analysis of high altitude falling accidents in construction, we get three minimum cut sets and sort the events into four important levels on the basis of basic events importance. Then we create a reason pre-control model with five levels to avoid falling accidents in construction, which concludes organizational factors, unsafe supervision, unsafe operating conditions, provided that unsafe behavior and unsafe behavior. By combining the optimal feedback paths basic event importance sort, we proposed targeted risk control measures, so as to achieve pre-control of falling accidents in construction.

Claim is a special component of project costing. It is important to increase owner and contractor understands of it, to strengthen research on claim theory and method, to treat and manage engineering project claim seriously. When facing claim or realizing the potential possibility of claims in construction engineering project, the contractor will first need to send written notice to the field engineer appointed by the employer (the owner), according to the timeline set by the mutually signed construction contract. The contractor will then need to strengthen the engineering project construction plan and construction contract management.

The ESCO (energy services company) industry in China is on the early start-up stage, lacking of relevant risk management methods, which frequently leads to failures. In order to improve this situation and promote its development, sixty-five policies on ESCO promulgated in China have been reviewed and existing cases have been summarized at first. Then the current tendency of ESCO is analyzed by using TRIZ mode and the main barriers of ESCO doing business in the building sector are identified, including factor in market, law, technology and financing. Finally, the risk assessment methodology of ESCO is proposed, by which a more complete model contracts or risk prevention mechanism is recommended to improve the risk control of ESCO.

Roof insulation damage in large scale terminal buildings under strong wind happens frequently, which is not only related to the circumstance where the building located but also related to the configuration of building itself which influence the micro wind climate and the way building roof response the wind pressure. 3D models of typical layout of terminal complexes were extracted out based on key elements such as efficiency of flows organization at first; Then the models were simulated in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) plate-form and the simulation results about distribution of wind pressure over roof surface were analyzed in order to find out the influence of building forms. The roof damage accident of Beijing T3 terminal is taken as a case in the research process. The paper ended with suggestion that the wind effluence should be considered seriously and comprehensively in form design of large-scale terminal complex.

With the continuous development of the construction industry, construction projects involved in increasingly uncertain factors, and the loss caused by the risk is also larger and larger. So it is necessary to provide a reasonable risk allocation to ensure the smooth progress of the project. Started with the basic principles of risk allocation, a risk bearing comprehensive ability evaluation system is established, with the contract parties’ attitude to the risk allocation. Then, the paper used the possibility degree method for ranking interval numbers to compare the risk bearing comprehensive ability of the contract parties. In this way, the paper gives a method to determine the optimal undertaker of the risk of construction project.

The financial risk of enterprise has caused concerns in the field of corporate operating and society economic development. With the integration of the global economy, professional and ethical standards of the CFO play a subjective role in company’s financial risk. Based on the CFO’s data of 2011-2013 Chinese listed real estate companies, this paper uses normative and empirical study methods to explore the correlation between corporate financial risk indicators and CFO’s characteristics that is from eight aspects such as age, gender, education, job title, tenure, salary levels, ownership, and whether to enter the board of directors. It can be seen that the CFO’s features really have certain influence on the enterprise financial risk. Furthermore, this paper expounds the role of positioning and the development trend of CFO, and then proposes some suggestions to reduce the financial risk of the real estate enterprises. From these states, strengthen the ethics and experiences of CFO construction, the financial performance will be out of the loss and confusion, thus maximum reduce financial risk from the enterprise internal.

Stakeholders have different benefit demands at each stage in the life cycle of construction project, therefore conflicts between stakeholders are inevitable, and this will affect on the realization of goals of project schedule, quality, cost and safety. Firstly, this paper defines the concept of construction project stakeholders and conflicts between them. Secondly, it analyzes the factors causing conflicts between construction project stakeholders and the main categories of conflicts at each stage in the life cycle of a construction project. In addition, it studies the main processes of conflict management, and then it puts forward the related mechanisms of conflict management.

Through analysis of the current situation of construction safety, most of the warming system and index system of construction safety are based on the traditional methods, which cannot meet the need of accuracy. As the methods of civil construction safety management are constantly improved, the precise and effective pre-warming system is desperately needed. Thanks to the development of the industrial informatization, artificial intelligence technology can forecast and assess the tendency based on effectively analysis of construction safety data. As an important branch of artificial intelligence research, Bayesian network can manage uncertainty problems, express and fuse multi-source information. Therefore, researching the construction safety pre-warming system based on Bayesian networks has notable theoretical and practical significance. This paper aims to build an improved construction safety pre-warming system and provides references for minimizing construction accidents.

Being different from traditional means for the finance in public projects, PFI cooperates with the government procuring from private finance to provide resources to the project in the public sectors. In the United Kingdom, PFI is widely used in many governments’ public projects. This article describes the current situation of PFI in China and the necessity of introducing PFI to China. It also includes the connotation of PFI and the different types of PFI. Then it describes eight kinds of risks that PFI will go through in China. Depend on PFI projects’ risk sharing principles and mechanisms, The PFI project risk management measures are proposed to promote PFI develop in China.

Now the competition of construction market is becoming more and more fiercely and China adopted engineering quantity list valuation for the construction market traction. Our country lastly introduces the 2013 edition of “code of valuation with bill quantity of construction engineering”(GB50500-2013) as the basis of list valuation. The owner issues tenders and the construction unit bidding for the project. This article aims to study how to choice fitful engineering by the construction unit and how to bidding effectively to increase the rate of win the bid maximally in the range of qualifications, then enterprises can made healthy and orderly progress.

Mortgage loan is one of the great innovations in real estate and financial sector. It entered the stage of rapid development since it was introduced from Hong Kong, which promoted the prosperity of the real estate industry. However, China’s mortgage history is very short. Based on the qualitative research of the international comparison, we found that the China’s mortgage system has the shortcomings of imperfect supporting system, unreasonable design, lacking of support for the low income earners etc., which creates a lot social frictions. We must perfect the mortgage system to give full play to the mortgage system and promote the healthy development of the real estate market. In reference to the foreign practice, this paper put forward some reform ideas: establish and perfect the personal credit system, innovate the loan products, provide preferential policy for the low and middle income earners etc.

With the rapidly economic growing rate, the price of the household ranks to the top and becomes the current issue in Chinese. In this study, it will give interpretation through different angles such as the eastern, middle, and western market. Then, study analyzes the representative 15 cities and then extracts into the 11 indexes of the price of housing. During the analyzing, the information of common factors are identified from 11 indexes and named into 3 common categories in order to obtain composite scores of the 15 cities and seek the root causes that influence development of real estate beyond the expected.

In recent years, Chinese international contractors (CICs) have been expanding their presence in the African market rapidly with the support of the Chinese government. Previously focused in traditional friendship countries such as Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan and Zambia, the CICs have rapidly established an increasing market presence in many African countries and become competitors to other overseas contractors. Taking the Nigerian market as a case study, this paper analyses the market share between CICs and contractors from other countries, the construction projects demand in African countries, the financing sources and the policies regulating the projects financing. Data used in this study are from multiple sources including literature review, statistical reports, regulations, policies and a case study of Nigeria. These findings should provide a valuable reference to evaluate the opportunities in the African market as well as to assist the decision making process for CICs who are interested in developing business in Africa.

The PPP, which is short for public-private partnership, is a kind of financing mode joints the government and private sectors together. The PPP project financial model can effectively solve the lack of funding and the financing mode selection and evaluation has become an important issue. On the basis of existing research results, this paper introduces the concept of PPP as well as leading economic efficiency into the activities of project financing. This paper proposes evaluation index of PPP project financing-the cost-effectiveness of project financing from the government’s point of view. Also this paper establishes the financing cost-effectiveness model for both BOT (build-operate-transfer) and BOO (build-own-operate) modes which are the most two common form of PPP and then analyze the reasons for their differences.

The research on real estate bubbles can be analyzed from two perspectives: the demand and supply variables, but most researchers only consider the supply variables while ignoring the important supply factor: the land supplement. The land supply amount and the supply mode affect the real estate market. The total amount of land supply may be directly proportional to the supply changes in the real estate market; while the size of a single parcel may be in an inverse proportion to the supply changes in the real estate market. Through theoretical analysis, we learn that the main ruling part’s monopoly of land markets has led to the total lack of land supply and the fact that the supply of a single parcel is too large, thus leading to real estate bubbles to a certain extent.

As a way of building ownership of land and ground operation, BT operation model has a good effect in the park development to alleviate the financial pressure and invite investment. This article will focus on the Guangzhou Baiyun Airport comprehensive Bonded Zone, BT operation model in the park development of economic and social benefits were analyzed, and combined with other existing operation model, comparative analysis of park development in BT model superiority.

Based on the review of the existing real estate marketing theories, this paper elaborated every link of the operation of project, according to the actual situation of Wuxi real estate project in Yongzhou. At first, the paper analyzed the marketing environment of Yongzhou Wuxi real estate project in detail, including the external environment, the internal environment, the market research and the analysis of SWOT. And then the paper sorted out the marketing strategy of Yongzhou Wuxi real estate project, based on STP strategy of product positioning, customer orientation, channel positioning, positioning of promotion and so on. At last, this paper proposed a feasible way on how to guarantee the project marketing strategy to be carried out. Based on the research on the real project operation, this paper has obtained a large amount of data in the Qiyang market. It is believed that the research on the similar Forth Grade Cities’ real estate business such as Qiyang City in the marketing practice will lead to some significant reference and guidance.

This paper seek to explain why life cycle costing (LCC) is used or not for renovation projects. The study is based on a theoretical explanation model called the technology acceptance model (TAM). The model assumes that a number of factors determine whether and when individuals will use a particular technology. Two main components of the model are (1) Perceived usefulness, and (2) Perceived ease of use. The response rate was 32.3%. The results show that the climate in terms of the extent to which LCC is advocated and used by colleagues affects how the individual experience both usefulness and ease of use. Our study also demonstrates that the perceived usefulness, i.e. how well you feel that LCC can be used in your daily work, lays the foundation for if it is perceived as positive to use, and thus also a prerequisite for creating an intention to use and subsequently applying LCC in actual renovation projects. The study shows that the ease of use does not have the same effect.

The first part of this paper introduces the background behind advance sale system of houses in the real estate industry. Next, we discuss the information contents of receipts in advance from surplus reserves and earnings management. Among them, we adopt the receipts in advance and earnings management empirical model to analyze whether receipts in advance could be a means of earnings management. Our study found that receipts in advance can provide related information for stakeholders to predict performance. However, this kind of information probably is the results of earnings management. At last, we present recommendations in the system of advance sale and the analyzing of information as well as establishing the information system, etc.

The existing ex-post evaluation system of investment projects is not completely suitable for social affordable housing projects. This paper proposes the specific ex-post evaluation mechanism for social affordable housing projects based on the investigation into the projects in Xiamen. Questionnaire was used in selecting the degree of concern towards all elements of every related part of the projects. The statistical data from questionnaire were analyzed by the software SPSS and then the index system can be obtained. The concrete evaluation methods changes along with the changes in evaluation contents. Before and after comparison has been used in the impact assessment, logical frame approach in the goal assessment, Delphi in the determining of the weight, and the overall evaluation result of projects can be determined through Success Degree Method. In the last section, there is an empirical study design based on Binshui block in Jimei, Xiamen to verify the evaluation mechanism is operable. The ex-post evaluation of social affordable housing projects should focus on especially the social impact of the projects, and pay attention to the public satisfaction. As the social affordable housing are mainly organized and operated by the government, the evaluation on project management should be an important part, policy and apply-distribute-processor in particular.

Firstly, the mechanism that affordable housing affected demand, supply and price of housing commodity was analyzed by economic theory, then VER models were created and the effect that affordable housing affected housing demand, land supply and housing price was analyzed by the methods of impulse response function and variance decomposition. An empirical analysis was conducted using the data of Chongqing from 1995 to 2010 and concluded that affordable housing had the positive impact on housing demand, negative-positive impact on land supply, and negative impact on housing price. However from the point of contribution rate, the impact of affordable housing on housing demand, supply and price was little. Finally some suggestions were made that the government should improve construction scale of affordable housing and try to satisfy housing demand of low-income families, which would cause crowing-out effect of housing demand and price.

With the rapid development of Chinese economy, our country real estate industry also developed rapidly. However, the real estate cycle is closely related to the banking system. Because in the operation process of the real estate enterprise, debt level of the enterprises plays an important role. This paper uses the listed real estate companies of stock markets of Shanghai and Shenzhen in 2009-2012 as research samples to do an empirical test of the effect of financial leverage on enterprise value. The empirical results show that in Chinese listed real estate companies, short-term debt of the enterprise has a significant positive effect on the enterprise value; but the effect of the long-term debt is not obvious on the enterprise value.

Although mainstream of multinational construction firms have origin from developed countries, the relevance of construction contracting firms (CCFs) from developing countries is on the rise and becoming increasingly important, some of them becoming important global players. Scholars propose both similarities and differences in the forms of internationalization process concerning industry and geographical dispersion for multinational corporations (MNCs) from emerging and developed economies. The aim of this paper is to examine the differences and similarities in the internationalization process of construction contracting firms from emerging and developed countries. For this purpose, the case study of Pakistani construction contracting firms (CCFs) and British construction contracting firms (CCFs) was undertaken. The features examined in this study are the objectives of internationalization and the significant firm-specific and home country-specific factors that influence the internationalization of Pakistani and British CCFs. Using integrated theoretical approach, this paper employs quantitative technique. The data were collected through postal questionnaire survey and company reports. A comparative statistical analysis of the data was done. Little differences were identified between British CCFs and Pakistani CCFs in terms of their objectives for internationalization and firm-specific competitive advantages, whereas significant differences were identified in terms of home-country specific competitive advantages. The findings of this study will provide valuable implications for the internationalization of construction contracting firms from developing as well as developed economies.

From the perspective of information spillover, an empirical study has been conducted in this paper about information spillover effect of the real estate plate in A-share secondary market on primary market’s IPO latest restarted in China. Through Johansen Co-integration Tests and Granger Causality Tests, it has been concluded that a long-lasting stable relationship exists between the real estate plate stock in A-share secondary market and the IPO in primary market; furthermore, any change in real estate plate stock index would trigger a variation in IPO financing volume.

In order to alleviate the shortage of energy, minerals, water, land and other resources and change the extensive and labor-intensive construction mode, housing industrialization has been promoted by the Chinese government since 1999. However, China’s housing industry is still on the initial development stage and more efforts should be devoted to exploring the implementation path of housing industrialization from the macro-level. To proceed from this point, this paper is committed to investigating the industrialized housing development patterns through analyzing the intrinsic relationship between supply and demand in the industrialized housing market. Then, combined with the China’s current situation, the above analytical results are extended and applied for finding out the main developmental bottlenecks and more importantly formulating our development mechanism for China’s long-term housing industry by means of causal loop diagram in the end.

Customer satisfaction of the products and service is an important source of competitive advantages of enterprises in the marketing of the pension real estate. First, this paper discussed the basic meaning of customer satisfaction. The customer satisfaction representative variable system based on the pension real estate market study was given, and a framework equation model was established. Then a survey of the pension real estate market customer satisfaction was designed, and the empirical analysis based on data and background of a project was conducted. The paper then discussed the intrinsic links among influencing satisfaction factors and their contributions to customer satisfaction. Finally, the marketing strategies of the pension real estate are proposed.

From the perspective of capital investment, this paper studies the impact path and mechanism for diversification strategy on firm value in real estate listed companies. The results show that there are two kinds of agency problems in diversified companies. One exists between shareholders and top management, and the other is between top management and department managers. Because of the problems, diversification always leads to over-investment, which makes marginal value of capital investment decrease. This conclusion not only expands the research framework of the relationship between diversification strategy and firm value in theory, but also provides new decision evidence for management and investors in practice.

The development of the real estate industry in Heilongjiang province was very fast in the last few decades, however, the development level in different regions was unbalanced, which needed policymakers’ special attention when making industrial policies for the whole province. But firstly and most importantly, we need to make sure the exact development level of each city. In order to solve this problem, appropriate evaluation index of the real estate economy was constructed in this paper, and based on factor and cluster analysis, this study analyzed the 12 main cities in Heilongjiang province quantificationally and classified them into 5 categories. For each single category, analysis and evaluations were made and relevant conclusions were obtained. At the end of the paper, some comments and suggestions were offered to help improve the development of the real estate industry.

Based on the down payment constraint of housing loans in selective tools of monetary policy, we build dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models which contain real estate consumption. This paper studies the response of the real estate price to down payment constraint using dynamic optimization method. Our results suggest that the policy of down payment constraint increases the cost of the down payment for families when they purchase houses, leading to the reduction of real estate consumption; higher down payments constraint causes the economic negative growth. Therefore the central bank should regard the economic growth as a primary objective in the process of the implementation of monetary policy without having to make an adjustment according to the operation condition of the real estate market.

In recent years, the real estate industry holds a significant position in China’s economic development. The economic growth can be not only directly driven by real estate development but also provides a good platform for the development of real estate. Real estate investment has the characteristics of large contributed capital and long business cycle. Along with the increasingly obvious market segmentation in different cities, the factors needed to be considered for real estate investment decisions become more comprehensive. Generally, the factors are divided into market factors, resource supply factors, cost factors and social factors. This thesis uses grey correlation degree analysis to make an empirical analysis of Heilongjiang’s real estate investment and then sort the factors from large degree to small one to filter out the main factors. Through empirical analysis, the author tests different factors and present a reasonable investment decision model.

To examine the relationships between population structure and housing price fluctuations, we construct an index system of population structure firstly, and then carry out an augmented Dickey-Fuller test and ordinary least squares regression to choose demographic variables that will be absorbed in the vector auto regressive model using data from Beijing between the year 2000 and 2011. Finally, it reveals that sex ratio, the tertiary industry employment proportion, food expenditure proportion, college and above educational level population proportion, and transferred income proportion has no effect on the fluctuations of housing price in Beijing; gross dependency ratio has the most impact, and can explain about 50% of the housing price change, family household scale and non-agricultural population proportion has less effect. It also shows that the response of housing price to gross dependency ratio and family household scale is positive at first, then turns to negative afterwards, but the response to non-agricultural population proportion is always positive.

Agent-construction mode in government investment projects is a new mechanism launched by the government investment system reform. Agent-construction is a popular international practice, but just start to be applied in China a decade ago. The various agent-construction modes appeared in the past eleven years as beneficial trials. This paper analyzed the characteristics of four main agent-construction modes which are used nowadays. Through the comparison of advantages and disadvantages of these modes, it found the ways to choose a suitable mode in certain circumstance by the key factor analysis. Furthermore the experience and reference to promote the application of agent-construction have been given.

Based on asymmetric information theory, signaling theory and principle-agent theory, this paper investigated 276 A share real estate companies in market of Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange, which had already published the Internal Control Self-assessment Report in the year 2011 to 2013. The thesis established a conceptual model of the internal control information disclosure quality and observed the determinants of internal control information disclosure quality through descriptive statistics, frequency analysis, correlation analysis, multiple linear regression and robustness test in empirical study. The result shows that under other conditions in certain circumstances, profitability, the largest shareholder, board independence, the type of audit opinion, audit agency authority and company size have positive effects on internal control information disclosure quality, while ownership concentration has negative effects on the quality of internal control information disclosure.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are one of the factors that constitute construction project success criteria which is the reason while performance measurement on construction projects are usually carried out by establishing KPIs which offer objective criteria to measure project success. An assumption is made that if a project is completed on time, within the agreed budget and set quality, also referred to as the ‘golden/iron triangle’, then the project is deemed successful. Evidence suggests that this is far from the truth. Hence, the construction industry needs to pay attention to critical success factors, besides the golden/iron triangle. Hence, this paper explores the most significant construction projects’ KPIs in the Gauteng province of South Africa. A questionnaire survey was used to collect the data for this study as a primary source in order to establish the most significant key performance indicators for construction projects in Gauteng, South Africa. Professionals such as architects, quantity surveyors, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, civil engineers, construction managers, project managers and construction project manager, were randomly selected as the target population for the survey. The secondary data was collected from a thorough review of related literature; it is through this thorough literature review that the key performance indicators for construction projects in Gauteng, South Africa, were identified which were further tested via the questionnaire survey. Findings from the questionnaire survey revealed that the most significant construction projects KPIs are: construction time, profitability, project management, material ordering, handling and management, risk management, quality assurance, client satisfaction (product), safety, time predictability (project, design, construction), productivity, client satisfaction (service). The study contributes to the body of knowledge on the subject of construction projects’ key performance indicators in the Gauteng Province of South Africa.

Although the construction industry plays an important role in the economic development and city construction of our country, it brings about a series of social problems that construction enterprises violate legal rights and interests of their employees and some construction engineering quality problems. Construction enterprises can improve their own figures and credit, increase the efficient of finance, strengthen their oversea construction ability and advance their oversea marketing status. The article reviews and analyzes some basis thoughts and evaluation ways about the social responsibilities of construction enterprises and analyzes some existent problems in order to provide some references for the evaluation model of social enterprises responsibility in China.

With the increasing emphasis on intellectualization and professionalization, building industrialization (BI) has become an inevitable trend of construction industry in China. However, enterprises face development barriers because of their confusion about their position, strength and weakness in the network. And managers’ implementations of BI are far from satisfactory because of lacking comprehensive perspective of BI organization. To resolve these issues, an analysis of BI micro social network is established based on the social network theory in this paper. Firstly, BI project’s micro social network is analyzed theoretically. Secondly, a questionnaire survey is conducted to collect authentic data and UCINET is used to quantify four network characters. The outcome of social network analysis indicates that developer is the information hinge of BI project whereas contractor and component supplier also occupy critical structural holes and play important roles in BI network. Theoretically, this study might provide a new perspective for implementer of BI to organize staff more effectively and allocate resources more rationally.

Financial restatement is the correction for the errors of previous financial reports; it not only brings the reliability of accounting information into doubt, but also reduces the value of the company and damages the interests of investors. As the administration of the company, the board of directors is responsible for the company’s financial statement. This paper tries to use the empirical study to find out the relationships between board characteristics of real estate companies and the financial restatement. Based on Upper Echelon Theory, this paper selects Chinese real estate listed companies from 2009-2013 as study sample, measuring the board characteristic from seven aspects: board size, board sex ratio, the frequency of board meeting, the separation of ownership, shareholding proportion of board members, proportion of the financial background directors, and proportion of the independent directors. In the end, based on the research conclusion, the paper puts forward some advice to perfect the board of directors system and reduce the incidence of financial restatements.

With the development of social economy in China, the contradiction between the listed real estate companies’ governance structure and social responsibility has become increasingly prominent, so the public call for the listed real estate companies to fulfill their social responsibility is growing. It has become a new challenge for corporate governance to effectively integrate social responsibility into the listed real estate companies’ governance structure. By selecting the data of information disclosure of 110 real estate companies listing in Shenzhen and Shanghai A-share market from 2007 to 2013 as samples, from the perspective of internal governance, the relation with social responsibility is analyzed, and the suggestions which can perfect the listed real estate companies’ governance structure to fulfill social responsibility effectively are put forward.

Innovation is the strategic support to social productive forces increased and the source of enterprise progress, more and more scholars pay close attention to enterprise innovation ability. Quantitative evaluation has contributed to the understanding of the enterprise innovative behavior and providing guidance for enterprises to develop innovative strategies. In order to analyze the current situation of construction industry innovation, improve the innovation ability and promote the sustainable and healthy development of construction enterprises, this paper reviews the building enterprise innovation ability and summarizes the innovation status of construction enterprises. It adds the new technologies, construction methods and other characteristics to the enterprise innovation ability evaluation index sets existed and analysis multiple aspects such as financial, staff, technical, etc. This paper is dedicated to put forward more suitable and feasible innovation ability evaluation indexes in conformity with the construction characteristics.

Investors of real estate listed companies is the community, so managers of those companies must conscientiously fulfill their obligations to disclose information to enable enterprises to be under the supervision and influence of shareholders, the community and other parties, thus effectively promote and improve the internal operation mechanism. How to correctly use the information to evaluate the real estate listed companies’ performance scientifically and provide reference information for all stakeholders and corporate managers, is a problem that becomes more and more urgent and important in theory and reality. The purpose of this study is to construct an integrated performance evaluation method that apply to the real estate listed companies. This study analyzes DEA’s applicability in the performance evaluation of the real estate listed companies using DEA. From the application steps of DEA, the study screens the appropriate decision-making units, establishes the input and output index system, determines the DEA model. So far, the study constructs a complete set of DEA-based performance method for real estate listed companies. And in this study, 40 Chinese real estate listed companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange or the Shenzhen Stock Exchange were selected as study subject between 2011 and 2013.We obtain the result of the evaluation, which reveals the cause why some listed companies suffer low efficiency. And it helps us find ways to solve them. Furthermore, through the comparison among evaluation, the paper analyses the tendency of the whole property development in these years.

Due to the severe competition and saturation of real estate market, vicious price competition reappears between the real estate enterprises in second and third-tier cities, which contribute to the unsustainable development of real estate enterprises. Therefore, reducing the construction cost, especially the tax cost, will certainly enhance an enterprise’s core competence. Based on the panel data of Chinese real estate tax and house price during 2002~2012, the influence of different types of real estate tax on the house price can be quantified to find out the correlation by the gray correlation analysis. According to the relational degree, some suggestions will be offered to prevent and control the possible tax risks caused by the increased tax costs of corresponding taxes. And on this basis, some possible solutions can be designed to avoid tax reasonably and achieve the goal of tax saving.

This paper has made valid evaluation of dynamic investment efficiency of 41 listed real estate companies between 2009 and 2013 using DEA-Malmqusit index. The result shows the current investment situation of listed real estate companies of our country is that the investment efficiency of companies is quite different and that the internal dynamic investment efficiency is unsteady and has relatively low efficiency. Positive research shows that dynamic investment efficiency of real estate companies is greatly influenced by technological change; listed real estate companies should formulate reasonable investment mode and management strategy according to their investment scale; improve the investment efficiency for the purpose of effectively promoting technological change so as to realize long-term development.

As the real estate industry becomes a pillar industry of China, its executive compensation has received widespread attention. To study the relationship between executive compensation and the performance of real estate corporations, this paper reviewed the studies of national and foreign scholars, and proposed three hypotheses around this issue. This paper selected the financial data of 122 listed real estate corporations, in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange A-share markets, from the year 2011 to 2013, and did the regression analysis by STATA. The research suggested that executive cash compensation had a positive correlation with corporate performance, but there was no significant correlation between the proportion of executive shareholding and corporate performance. Neither did the research suggest that there is any interval effect in proportion of executive shareholding and corporate performance. In view of the above, this paper proposed some corresponding recommendations to improve executive compensation incentive mechanism of listed real estate corporations.

There is a sign that the way of advancing the safety management system to improve the security is facing with the further developing difficult. As Chinese construction industry is still labor-intensive, the “person” is a special as well as key factor in the whole process. In this paper, scales about safety culture, safety motivation and safety performance are established on survey data analysis. The structure model of safety performance is created by combining the safety performance model with self-determination theory, and the relationship between the three dimensions of safety culture is verified by using path analysis. The results showed that the three dimensions of safety culture are significantly related; Safety motivation plays a fully mediating role between safety culture and safety performance behavior; the relationship between the self safety motivation and safety performance behavior is closer than control safety motivation. The empirical result also provides some policy implication for improving the construction safety performance.

With the deepening of economic globalization, the impact of executive incentive on corporate performance attracts more and more attention. In this paper, based on the data of Chinese listed real estate companies in recent years, the study highlights the correlations between executive incentive and corporate performance by empirical research methods. To quantify the executive incentive, the ratio of managerial ownership and the sum of senior managers’ annual payment are selected. According to the results of regression analysis and robustness test, the conclusion can be drawn that corporate performance is positively related to executive incentive. Meanwhile, the study shows that equity incentives in Chinese listed real estate companies are not perfectly functional. Finally, there are several specific suggestions about executive incentive for Chinese real estate companies.

The objective of this study is to explore the causes of small businesses failure within the Johannesburg construction industry, a metropolitan municipality in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The data for the study was collected through a structured questionnaire survey distributed to a sample of 30 owners of small and medium construction companies in Gauteng. The research respondents were construction professionals who work in SMEs. The survey results shown that the major causes of small business failure can be divided into two aspects, which are external and internal. The internal factor revealed from the study include- lack of financial managerial ability and general administration of the business. The study findings revealed the urgent areas that small construction businesses need to be supported in order for them to be sustainable which in order guarantee job security for construction professionals who are employed in these companies; thus contributing to the macroeconomic indicators of the economy.

The real estate industry is characterized by high investment and high fund demand. As a result, a reasonable capital structure is very important to it. Based on the analysis of current research about the corporate income tax and debt financing at home and abroad, combined with the amended Modigliani-Miller, trade-off and pecking order theories, this paper selects the real estate company data from 2009 to 2013 as research samples and analyzes the correlation between the corporate income tax burden and debt financing through empirical study. Moreover, the correlation between no-debt tax shield and debt financing is studied at the same time. This study aims to help the real estate industry ensure its reasonable proportion of financing and optimize its capital structure.

Construction and operation of buildings and infrastructure is a main contributor to emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) in Sweden. The embodied energy of construction, meaning all the energy that is used until the completion of the construction project (see Figure 1), cause roughly 10 million tones of CO₂ equivalent emissions each year which equals to the emissions from all cars in Sweden (IVA 2014). About 6 million tones of CO₂ equivalent emissions are attributed to the embodied energy of roads, railroads and other civil works while the remaining 4 million tones are attributed to the embodied energy of buildings (IVA 2014). Although reducing energy use and associated GHG-emissions in road and railroad construction is prioritized by the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket 2012), the GHG-emissions from such construction projects have increased in recent years (Boverket 2014). Many of the existing efforts to reduce energy use and associated GHG-emissions focus on individual phases of the life cycle and don’t take into consideration the effects at other stages during the whole life cycle of a project (Boverket 2011). A crucial step in the assessment of energy use and associated GHG-emissions is to clarify and categorize the different phases of a life cycle. Figure 1 shows a proposed categorization of life cycles phases and use of energy based on previous research (Davies et al. 2014). Buildings’ main use of energy happens during its operational phase from e.g. heating, lighting and use of electrical appliances (Sartori and Hestnes 2007). In infrastructure projects such as road construction the embodied energy is roughly equal to the operational energy for roads with lighting, or in fact considerably higher if the road lacks lighting (Stripple 2001).

With the increased need for transport options and the pressures for residential housing requirements, more residential property sectors are becoming subject to transport noise. Increasing road, railway and aircraft noise is affecting a greater number of residents in major cities and towns. Previous Hedonic Price Model studies have shown a link between transport noise and residential property prices but these studies are often contradicted by buyer and seller behavior in these markets. This paper will review a range of residential property research studies focusing on aircraft transport orientated noise and in the next stage of this research project will compare these studies to the anecdotal results from print and electronic media on the same issue. These results will show if there is a long term relationship between house prices in these locations and transport noise or if these negative value drivers are offset by other positive locational factors such as distance to employment, location to schools and services, and the location to recreational facilities.

The equilibrium of urban infrastructure construction investment is significant for the equilibrium of regional economy development and social stability. This paper quantitatively analyzes the equilibrium of urban infrastructure construction Investment by the method of Gini coefficient. First of all, this paper selects Chinese urban infrastructure construction investment index through the literature research. Then, this paper draws the Lorenz curve and calculates the population and GDP Gini coefficient of Chinese urban infrastructure construction investment. The results show that, on the whole, Chinese urban infrastructure construction investment is in a state of “comparative equilibrium” at present. From 2004 to 2013, Chinese urban infrastructure construction investment based on population develops toward a more balanced direction. The equilibrium of urban infrastructure construction investment based on GDP nearly remains unchanged. China gives more and more attention to the equilibrium of Chinese urban infrastructure construction investment based on population.

Doing estimation of cumulative amount of rural infrastructure investment is the premise to research into internal reason for rural economic growth. Perpetual inventory method (PIM) is a proper and scientific theory to measure the cumulative amount of capital. Firstly, this article handles and analyzes the economic depreciation rate, initial cumulative amount of capital, investment in successive years and price index of investment. Then, it estimates cumulative amount of Henan rural infrastructure investment at the end of years from 2000 to 2012. Lastly, it discusses the measurement data and puts forward to the focus of further research. The results show describing the contribution degree of rural fixed assets in the economy development.

This paper researches on disaster-reply of critical infrastructure in emergencies from the angles of vulnerability evaluation and availability evaluation of emergency disposal. This paper provides related research system framework between vulnerability of critical infrastructure and availability of emergency management. This system creates the theory foundation for the evaluation on the ability of critical infrastructure’s disaster prevention and mitigation, the formulation of emergency plan system and the creation of protective plan.

Development of professional education has a very significant meaning for the entire real estate industry. This article describes the situation and problems of Chinese real estate education. Through combining the pressure of industry upgrading which the real estate industry now faces, it also proposes the training objectives of future talents and the reform direction of professional education.

Typically, only a limited number of consortiums are able to competitively bid for public private partnership (PPP) projects. Consequently, this may lead to oligopoly pricing constraints and ineffective competition, thus engendering ex ante market failure. In addressing this issue, this paper aims to determine the optimal number of bidders required to ensure a healthy level of competition is available to procure major infrastructure projects. The theories of structure-conduct-performance (SCP) paradigm; Game Theory and Auction Theory and transaction cost economics are reviewed and discussed and used to produce an optimal level of competition for major infrastructure procurement, that prevents market failure ex ante (lack of competition) and market failure ex post (due to asymmetric lock-in).

Metro case statistics results indicate that the passenger’s aberrant behaviors (PAB) are becoming one of the major sources of metro disruption in China, which affects people’s day-to-day life and social economy significantly. However, so far less attention has been paid to this theme. To fully explore the vulnerability due to the PAB (VDPAB) in urban metro system (UMS), this paper presents an integrate analysis framework for measuring passenger induced vulnerability at both the metro station level and metro network level. Distinguished from orthodox methodologies, the proposed framework lays stress on incorporating pre-incident analysis in VDPAB assessment process. Appropriate methods can be applied in each section of the framework and what fundamental points need to take into account are explained through a concrete metro case.