2012 Best Paper Award

As the field’s academic and professional community continues to strive for excellence, it is important that outstanding contributions be recognized. In an effort to promote continued achievement, the 2012 Best Paper Award goes to Hakob G. Avetisyan, Elise Miller-Hooks, and Suvish Melanta for their paper “Decision Models to Support Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction from Transportation Construction Projects,” published in the May 2012 issue (Vol. 138, No. 5, pp. 631–641).

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the construction and rehabilitation of highway infrastructure make up 13.22% of the emissions in the construction sector (Truitt 2009) a significant 131 million metric tons of ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ equivalents (Mmt ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ eq). As the challenges of climate change mount, there has been increasing recognition of the need to reduce emissions. Most of these emission-cutting efforts have focused on the choice of construction materials and highway designs that reduce facility life-cycle emissions. However, very limited research has been conducted investigating ways of managing equipment fleets on construction processes to streamline and reduce construction-phase emissions. This paper is one of the first efforts to address directly and filling that gap.

The authors developed a very practical and accessible methodology that construction firms can use to select an equipment fleet based on an assessment of project needs while optimizing costs and project GHG emissions. It accounts for equipment cost, availability, workload requirements and constraints, productivity, and abilities and limitations established by Maryland’s tier system guidelines for equipment on construction sites. The paper very effectively illustrates the application of the method to make an optimal equipment selection using the case of a 11.5 km (7.2 mi) stretch of the Intercounty Connector highway construction in Maryland as an example.

The point of departure of this paper from current equipment selection methods is that it explicitly accounts for GHG emissions when selecting equipment. In addition, it supports the selection of an equipment fleet for an entire project, instead of only for a single activity/operation. This provides decision-makers with the ability to optimize costs and emissions when selecting equipment for various activities by actively accounting for project-specific constraints.

The paper presents a method that can be used by contractors to estimate and quantify reductions in carbon emissions when selecting project equipment. Wide adoption and application of this method may help provide the construction industry with practical guidelines when implementing strategies that limit carbon emissions. Given the current challenges of climate change and the ongoing discussion of alternative emission reduction regimes, such as cap and trade, this method could have broad practical impact.

The paper represents a significant advancement in the field of sustainable construction and should be recognized with the Best Paper Award.

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to the Best Paper Award Committee [Baabak Ashuri, Yong Bai, Young Hoon Kwak, SangHyun Lee, Gunnar Lucko, Amlan Mukherjee, John E. Taylor (Chair), and Zhenhua Zhu] for undertaking this assignment and for executing it in such a professional, transparent, and timely manner. I know how much work they put into it.