Editor’s Note

“Factors Affecting International Construction”: Understanding that a construction company’s decision to expand into international markets must be based on a good understanding of the opportunities and threats associated with international business. Gunhan and Arditi perform two rounds of a Delphi survey to assess which factors play key roles in determining a company’s ability to perform successfully in international markets. Several factors describing company strength and the threats relative to international markets are identified and discussed.

“Contractor’s Risk Attitudes in the Selection of International Construction Projects”: Han, Diekmann, and Ock describe findings from experiments that investigate the risk attitude and bid decision behavior in the selection of international projects. The writers find the experimental supports for some of the errors and biases due to risk attitudes that commonly exist in international construction bid decisions. Afterward, lessons learned and guidelines to make a qualified bid decision through feedback with the participants are presented.

“Comparative Analysis of Shoring Towers for High-Clearance Construction”: The demand for shoring towers for cast-in-place concrete in high-clearance construction has sparked a response in the form of numerous proprietary shoring models being offered to the industry. Thus, a need for comparative data and selection criteria for choosing the most appropriate system is needed. Shapira and Raz present methodology, formatted data, and findings that purport to assist constructors in rationally selecting the appropriate shoring towers for their projects.

“Determination of Haul Distance and Direction in Mass Excavation”: Son, Mattila, and Myers develop a mathematical optimization model for the determination of minimum haul distances and directions. Using specific inputs, the model determines the quantity of earth hauled, the minimum haul distances, and the locations to haul the material, after which the solution is made into a vector diagram detailing the quantity and direction to move material, which can be used by nontechnical personnel in the field.

“Probability of Project Completion Using Stochastic Project Scheduling Simulation (SPSS)”: In his paper, Dong-Eun Lee introduces Stochastic Project Scheduling Simulation—software developed to measure the probability of completing a project in a certain time specified by the user. The program can be used by a contractor to perform several other tasks, including assessing capabilities to meet the contractual requirement before bidding and to quantify and analyze the risks involved in the schedule.

“General-Purpose Situational Simulation Environment for Construction Education”: Believing that the traditional construction education model based on precise, well-defined problems and formal definitions is not satisfactorily fulfilling its mission of educating the decision makers of tomorrow, Rojas and Mukherjee search for solutions to improve construction education. The writers describe the conceptual framework and pilot implementation of a general-purpose environment designed to overcome the shortcomings of special-purpose situational simulations called the Virtual Coach.

“CPM with Multiple Calendars”: Major project management software packages such as P3 and MS-Project provide functions to handle multiple calendars, but the background theory of handling the multiple calendars has not been disclosed. Kim and de la Garza describe how multiple calendars should be handled in scheduling. Applying their theory, the authors notice that current planning software may generate a wrong answer for a start-to-finish with zero lag, and inconsistent results in all negative lags when nonworking days are involved.

“Programmatic Cost Risk Analysis for Highway Megaprojects”: Traditional methods of cost estimation take a deterministic, conservative approach to project cost estimating and then add a contingency factor that varies depending on the stage of project definition, experience, and other factors. Molenaar, pointing out that this approach falls short and no industry-standard stochastic estimating practice is currently available, presents a methodology developed by the Washington State Department of Transportation for its Cost Estimating Validation Process, which successfully summarizes programmatic risks.

“Change Orders Impact on Labor Productivity”: Moselhi, Assem, and El-Rayes describe a study conducted to investigate the impact of change orders on construction productivity and introduce a new neural network model for quantifying this impact. Factors contributing to the adverse effects of change orders on labor productivity are identified and the model presented earlier by Moselhi is expanded to account primarily for the timing of change orders, among other factors.

“Quantifying Engineering Project Scope for Productivity Modeling”: Noting that a poor scope definition in an engineering design project disrupts project rhythm, causes rework, increases project time and cost, and lowers the productivity and morale of the workforce, Song and AbouRizk propose a conceptual model, the Quantitative Engineering Project Scope Definition. The model quantitatively measures engineering project scope in terms of the complexity of design items by defining design categories and complexity functions appropriate to the particular discipline. The writers find that the new method leads to increased utilization of previously untapped values in historical data, improving the accuracy of project scope definition and productivity modeling.

“Management’s Perception of Key Behavioral Indicators for Construction”: Cox, Issa, and Koblegard develop and distribute a survey within the construction industry and use the results to generate key behavioral indicators for identifying motivated, satisfied, committed, and loyal construction workers. These behavioral indicators may be used by construction industry practitioners to better address employee performance and to enable managers to assess the outcomes of their human resource management decisions. In addition, the findings of this research further substantiate several previous behavioral studies and provide insight into several areas for future investigations.

“Improving Transportation Projects Using Laser Scanning”: Jaselskis, Gao, and Walters describe a case study investigating the use of laser scanning to acquire design and construction data. The study proves that laser scanning is ideally suited for measuring the volume of soil and rock, determining road surface elevations and bridge beam camber, and assisting in the creation of as-built drawing in a 3D environment. It is also discovered that this technique can be used quite effectively for safer and more accurate construction measurement. The writers then discuss time requirements, cost comparisons to photogrammetry, and limitations of the method.