Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

This paper discusses problems with contract documents prepared for roadway rehabilitation that field engineers experience during construction. It addresses the issues of existing utilities, drainage, and right‐of‐way restrictions as they impact proposed construction. It identifies specific problem areas experienced during construction and describes modifications that were made in the field in order to solve the problems. The major theme of the paper is that not enough time and/or consideration seems to be given to alleviate conflicts with existing conditions during design. This means that significant design modifications must be made in the field in order for many of the items to be constructed. The paper raises the issue that a better product will result if conflicts are eliminated during design. Persons most interested in this paper may be designers or people who review plans. Contractors and field personnel can benefit from it also because of the examples given toward solving the problems.

Long‐term construction projects have the potential to adversely affect the quality of life of residents living adjacent to the proposed activity. It is therefore desirable to quantify the relative impacts of various options as a part of the overall decision‐making process in choosing a preferred alternative. A technique is described that compares the potential noise impacts of construction hauling for a number of project alternatives. The technique presented herein is based on a modification of the level weighted population method to account for the duration of the hauling activity along various haul routes. The resulting descriptor is termed the level/duration weighted population (LDWP). The use of this technique is demonstrated through application to an actual flood control construction project under study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The LDWP method allowed the Corps to quantitatively evaluate various project alternatives from the haul noise impact point of view.

During the past two decades a number of graduate construction programs have been developed at universities. This paper presents the results of a nationwide survey of university graduate construction programs and construction flrms. The results provide an evaluation of what universities are currently offering, along with what the construction industry would like to see in graduate construction education.

Roller‐compacted concrete dams, in which the concrete is placed and compacted in thin layers from abutment to abutment without interior formwork, have been found to be very economical. The writer suggests that potential problems of seepage along lift lines, temperature and drying shrinkage cracking, and segregation of aggregates may be minimized or eliminated by the use of gap‐graded aggregate concrete. This type of concrete consists of a skeleton of single‐size coarse aggregate, the voids of which are filled with a graded fine aggregate, cement, and water. The maximum size of the fine aggregate is one‐eighth of the minimum size of the coarse aggregate and the very fine sand is eliminated to reduce the specific surface of the aggregates, thereby minimizing the water and cement requirements. The resulting material is a minimum slump, very dense concrete with low cement content. The proportioning method for the concrete mix is straightforward, depending only on the compaction characteristics of the aggregates, the specific gravities of the materials, and the water‐cement ratio needed for design strength. The advantages of gap‐graded aggregate for roller compacted concrete dams warrant the extra crushing or screening required.

Existing linear programming methods of earthwork allocations in road construction assume that the unit costs of earthwork activities are constant. This paper investigates the factors that affect the variations of unit costs and presents a model of earthwork allocations that incorporates nonconstant unit costs. The unit costs may vary with the total quantity of materials moved from cut to fill sections or disposal sites and from borrow pits to fill sections. For earthwork from cut sections, the unit costs can be established from the known quantities of cut sections (and other operating conditions) and can then be treated as constants in the model. For earthwork from borrow pits, the unit costs also vary with the total quantity to be moved from a borrow pit to fill sections, but this quantity is unknown. These unit costs are formulated as three‐component stepwise functions. The solution of the model is explored and a computer program, EARTHN, which solves the model quite efficiently, is developed. The model is applied to a numerical example to illustrate its use, and possible extensions of the model are examined.

Construction management (CM) is a long‐used practice of the construction industry that began to achieve status as a system in the early 1970s. Today CM is a unique alternative system of contracting that competes with the general contracting and design‐build contracting systems as a means of delivering projects. The CM system breaks down into several forms that have separate variations. CM services are provided by construction managers using different practitioner formats. In essence, CM services comprise a menu from which a form and its variation are selected. For these reasons, users (owners) often have difficulty understanding the services available and determining the combination of services that best suits their requirements when engaging a construction manager. The guidelines presented are in fundamental form in order to accommodate both first‐time users of CM services and repeat users seeking additional CM information. Those in the latter group can except the fundamentals and abbreviate the selection process as they see fit.

For the last 10 years it has been increasingly recognized that the level of influence over costs is greatest during the design phase of a project, and that construction knowledge is necessary in this phase. The construction manager can provide this knowledge in many design and design‐related functions, listed in this paper. The construction manager is an advisor only on actual design, but takes a leadership role in many of the planning and control functions, such as contract packaging, schedules, site layouts, access, work rules, and labor and safety provisions. With the leadership role there is a potential liability in design review, cost and schedule estimates, and on‐site design‐related functions. All parties, especially owners, should recognize the use of construction expertise, but also the liability risks that accompany such responsibilities.

The effects of outage work upon the efficiency of nonmanual personnel are examined in a case study at one nuclear power plant. Problem areas included orientation and training, paperwork, work schedule, containment work, and shift turnovers. The impact of these problems upon the individual was examined in such areas as job satisfaction, working relationships, stress, money, and personnel turnover. Specific departments' problems were also pinpointed. An overview of the client's perspective and general lessons learned are given. The paper concludes with problems that are generic to all outage work: recognizing the differences between new construction and outage projects, boosting morale, the need for detailed preplanning and centralized control, and improving working conditions in the containment area.

Construction financing is continually evolving, especially with regard to the role of the contractor. Of the various schemes surfacing, counter‐trade financing is perhaps the most difficult for modern contractors. This barter approach where coffee beans or oil may be used to purchase construction services is really not so new or so complex as many imagine. Construction of the Texas State Capitol Building (1882–1888) provides a fascinating example of rewards, problems, and lessons of this approach.

Retirement and replacement models for construction equipment have been based on the notion that there is an optimum time to sell a piece of equipment to the competition. One problem with these models is that they do not explain why one's competition may have a need for the equipment when one does not. The model presented here looks at the consequential costs of downtime for each piece of equipment when assigned to specific applications. Old and unreliable equipment therefore carries a significant consequential downtime cost when used in a key production application. Likewise, new and reliable equipment carries a significant capital recovery cost, which makes it less desirable in applications where consequential costs of downtime are low. This model provides a methodology to assign equipment optimally and to identify equipment for which its owner typically has no good applications.

A direct solution technique determines optimum markup for competitive construction bids using either lowest opposing bid models or average opposing bid models. A graphical representation helps explain the technique. Lowest competing bids can be standardized, and a table shows standardized optimum markup to fit any normally distributed lowest opposing bids. The paper explains: (1) the effects of differing numbers of competitors on the lowest opposing bids; and (2) the relationship between average and lowest opposing bids for differing numbers of competitors. The direct method provides the same answers as an accurate trial‐and‐error method, but it is quicker, once the variables of a normal distribution are calculated. Its quickness leads to easy comparisons for numbers of competitors.

Methods of analyzing competitive bidding have treated construction projects as isolated elements to be optimized without regard to availability of work or other opportunity costs. This paper shows how resource restraints and opportunities can be easily included in these competitive bid analyses, so that a contractor's decisions concerning the overall firm or its individual projects reflect a broad view of the firm's market position. It is shown how markup decisions and predictions of corresponding expected values can take into consideration other possible projects and uses for the firm's limited resources, and also it can take into consideration estimated project costs that differ from the historical base. Consideration of opportunity costs and resource restrictions integrates data and decisions for greater understanding of a firm's competitive position and better business decisions in general. An example demonstrates the methods.

As part of a research study, conversations with construction superintendets led to subjective assessments of their qualities as managers. Their assessments were tabulated and compared to the corresponding safety records of the superintendents. Results show that those superintendents who exhibited the strongest attributes of being good managers had good safety performances on their projects. Conversely, those superintendents who were rated as being weak in their managerial capabilities were more strongly associated with poor safety performances.