Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

In 1927 John F. Stevens was elected president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and in so doing the Society honored a great engineer, a great builder, and a man who truly loved the practice of civil engineering. Stevens was a self-trained engineer and constructor who directed some of the great construction efforts of the 19th and 20th centuries. In his early years, Stevens was engaged in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, first with the contractors and then for the railway company directly. Two presidents thought so highly of his engineering skill that they appointed him to lead major construction efforts in the early 20th century. President Theodore Roosevelt made him chief engineer of the Isthmian (Panama) Canal work, and Wilson sent him to Russia in 1917, as chairman of a commission of railway engineers to rehabilitate and operate rail lines in Siberia. This narrative traces his adventures and growth as an engineer, but it also provides guidance as to how an engineer develops his capabilities in order to handle greater challenges.

As traditional construction procurement approaches are found to be inadequate in meeting the demands and challenges of recent times, alternative procurement routes such as through management contracting or build-operate-transfer are increasingly being adopted. Although design/build is one of the more popular alternative procurement methods that also has a long history, it does not appear to have well-established contractor selection procedures. This paper focuses on developing a model for contractor prequalification and bid evaluation in design/build projects. For this purpose, it presents a comparative overview of some international practices in the design/build contractor selection process. The overall objective is to identify the core aspects of selecting a suitable bidder in order to achieve the best “value for money.” The strengths and weaknesses of current practices of contractor selection are highlighted while identifying some of the best practices followed in design/build projects by various clients.

This paper investigates the forces that drive construction firms to adopt new information technologies. The research focuses on CAD and electronic data interchange technologies and studies in-depth eight innovation adoption decisions. The paper presents the findings regarding the forces that created the managerial stimuli for innovation and the organizational characteristics that played an important role in the adoption. The investigation identified four forces that drive innovation: competitive advantage, process problems, technological opportunity, and institutional requirements. These forces change over time and drive the diffusion of a technology in the industry. The study also found that different organizational characteristics determine a company's sensitivity to each force. The paper proposes a new model of diffusion of new technologies and presents the implications for increasing the rate of innovation in the industry.

The bidding decision is a complex problem affected by numerous factors. The current study collected a list of determining factors from the results of past research and opinions of six experienced practitioners in competitive bidding. Based on these factors, a bid reasoning model was established to go deeply into the bid decision process. Differing from other earlier work, this model-oriented study focuses on the effects of the determining factors on four reasoning subgoals: competition, risk, company's position in bidding, and need for work. Their different contributions to each reasoning subgoal were reviewed under three main construction procurement methods, namely, unit rate contract, lump sum contract, and design/build contract. The Analytic Hierarchy Process technique was applied in this study. A survey questionnaire was developed with four hierarchies being formulated respectively for the four reasoning subgoals. The survey was conducted in two steps, the pilot survey among the six experienced practitioners and the subsequent one among 153 top contractors in Singapore. From this survey, a set of top key factors and their relative importance weights were identified. This result together with the bid reasoning model can serve as the framework for the further development of the bid decision support system.

This paper describes the results of three case studies in which the subcontractor-fabricator relations had a significant negative effect on labor productivity of the subcontractor. Late vendor deliveries, fabrication or construction errors, and out-of-sequence deliveries plagued each of the three projects. On two projects, there were work stoppages because there were no materials. Unsequenced deliveries caused unnecessary crane movements and rework. On the third project, the output of the fabrication shop was not compatible with the output of the erection crew. The baseline productivity was calculated, and the loss of labor efficiency in each case was estimated to be 16.6, 28.4, and 56.8%. These percentages were compared with similar percentages calculated from other published articles that described inefficient site storage conditions and delivery methods. The labor inefficiencies caused by material management range from a low of 5.4% to a high of 56.8%. The schedule slippage on the three case study projects was estimated to be between 50 and 129%.

This paper makes a practice-based critique of the assumptions behind network planning methods from the perspective of subcontractors and suppliers. In the context of a case example, the time-cost trade-off and its resource-oriented extensions are critiqued as being incapable of representing the capacity costs and constraints of subcontractors and suppliers. These methods are also critiqued as being incapable of representing the effects of site conditions on productivity, which in turn affects the capacity choices of subcontractors. Restricting the focus to the general building industry, case findings from 15 subcontractors and suppliers are presented. The case research indicates that capacity constraints systematically affect subcontractors and suppliers and that site conditions affect the productivity of subcontractors. Moreover, it is found that these firms consistently take action to mitigate the impact of capacity constraints and site conditions on cost. This second finding suggests that not only do network planning methods fail to account for the costs of capacity constraints and site conditions, but also that the schedules generated by network techniques will be inaccurate. Hence, the research implies that much of the current basis of construction costing and control is inadequate to its task, and that new methods must be developed that more realistically represent the needs of construction subcontractors and suppliers.

Civil infrastructure systems, particularly the highway and bridge systems, have become a focal point of attention both nationally and among researchers. Because many of the nation's bridges have been identified by the Federal Highway Administration as deficient, more attention needs to be given to the quality of bridge coatings, which act as inhibitors of bridge deterioration. This paper represents an extended study by the authors to establish and implement contract warranties for steel bridge coatings. First, the earlier activities in warranting the quality of bridge coatings are reviewed. Next, the writers focus on the basic categories of a steel bridge coating warranty, especially the warranty period and defects for which the contractor is held responsible. The paper further illustrates the functioning of a hybrid model for nondestructive quality assessment of steel bridge coatings. The model provides objective and quantitative analysis to improve the coating quality assessment process. This approach prevents potential conflicts that might arise between the state Department of Transportation and the bridge-coating contractors during the warranty implementation.

The worldwide experience in the construction of roller-compacted concrete (RCC) dams together with the use of numerical solutions, allows the simulation of different scenarios in a computer. It is well documented that thermal control is one of the most important problems for RCC dam construction. The dam temperature changes due to the heat produced by the internal hydration of concrete and the environmental boundary conditions influencing the elastic modulus and creep properties of concrete. The construction process was simulated to study how the temperature and stress change during dam construction. The numerical methodology considers the effect of temperature on the elastic modulus and the creep behavior of concrete. A 3D finite-element program was developed to simulate the construction process. An engineering application of this methodology is presented by simulating the construction of an RCC gravity dam in southern China. The results show how the temperature and stress change with the construction process. The results also show that it is feasible to build RCC dams in low temperature seasons without additional temperature control measures.

In spite of impressive progress in project modeling and computer-integrated construction, there is little real integration—manual or computerized—between design and construction of building projects. Consequently, constructability problems are experienced during the construction phase. With regard to rebar, constructability problems are discovered either after casting the reinforced concrete element or not at all, resulting in a weaker element. This paper describes a rebar constructability model, which was developed in an object-oriented graphic environment. The model is intended to be used during the design phase to automatically diagnose potential rebar-related constructability problems (the Diagnosis Module), as well as to offer solutions and implement them (the Correction Module). Of these two modules, the Diagnosis Module was implemented in a concept-proving prototype. The proposed model searches for constructability problems through all relevant parts of the building. This search includes the structural design, as well as other building systems (e.g., sanitary, drainage, HVAC). The model also checks for potential collisions between reinforcement bars and temporary inserts (e.g., form ties). Thus, in addition to the resulting increased constructability, the model also has potential as a system coordination tool.

In the past decade the terms “zero accidents” and “zero injuries” have been used a great deal by construction firms espousing their commitment to safety. Studies have shown that many construction firms, especially those in the industrial sector, have enjoyed significant improvements in their safety performances. These performance statistics have been considerably better than those of the overall construction industry and provide clear testimony of the effectiveness of efforts to improve safety. Although safety performances have been impressive among many of these firms, a study was conducted to see if additional improvements could be made. The study was conducted with a selected group of large, primarily industrial, firms to determine if any changes had been made since the Construction Industry Institute publicized its findings on effective means to improve safety performance. Results show that additional changes have been made by many of these firms and that the benefits were also realized. Safety performances have improved since these additional safety practices have been implemented. The implication is that firms with good safety records can still make improvements by implementing specific safety practices.

Recent research has shown that the frequency of traffic accidents is influenced by changes in clocks from standard time to daylight savings time. A study was conducted to determine if a similar phenomenon existed with the occurrence of injuries in the construction industry. Data relating to injury claims of construction workers in the state of Washington for 1990–1996 were analyzed to determine if stress due to the change in time from standard to daylight savings in the spring and from daylight savings to standard time in the fall, respectively, resulted in an increase and decrease in construction accidents. For spring and fall, with respect to injury frequency, the injury frequency for the Monday following the change of time was compared with that of the Monday before the change, and the Monday 1 week later. No statistical differences were found to exist. In addition, injury statistics for the week before the change were compared with the week following the change. Again, no statistical differences between the two were found to exist.