Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

The quality of writing of construction specifications is one of the greatest challenges facing construction contractors or their representatives in today’s business environment. Writers of construction specifications have been criticized for their contribution toward construction disputes. Although the construction business environment has moved toward modernization of some of its business processes, claims arising from construction specifications continue to rise. Equally, a written exposition of a quantitative instrument that measures the quality of writing of construction specifications is not available in the literature. Thus the construction industry needs to develop methodologies for measuring the quality of writing of construction specifications that should overcome their current underperformance in this area. This paper presents the procedures that underlie the quality of writing of construction specifications, gives a management tool for facilitating its measurement, and also presents the results of construction contractors’ practices regarding the quality of said writing. The results show that the surveyed Malawian construction contractors were in the process of putting in place principles to govern the quality of writing of construction specifications.

Subcontractors are very important to the successful completion of most construction projects, yet the many issues involved in subcontracting practice are seldom acknowledged. A literature review indicates that these issues include the timeliness of payments by general contractors, the process of selecting subcontractors, subcontractor bonding, construction insurance, safety issues on the construction site, partnering arrangements with various parties, and productivity issues. A questionnaire survey was administered to subcontractors, general contractors, and construction owners to investigate these issues and to determine the differences in perceptions between the parties. The results confirm the existence of the issues identified in the literature and in addition indicate that (1) the practice of retainage withheld by general contractors seems to be acceptable to many subcontractors unless its magnitude is large relative to the size of the firm; (2) postaward bid shopping by general contractors is sometimes justified, particularly in cases where the scope of subcontract work is modified; and (3) current bonding and insurance practices are adequate unless the additional transferred risks are excessive. Recommendations are made on the basis of the findings to minimize the negative effects of said issues.

Design coordination of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) systems in buildings is a multidisciplinary effort to locate equipment, route distribution systems, and resolve interferences between systems that can cause field conflicts. Absent from existing research are defined metrics of design coordination—how much it costs to perform depending on project variables, and the true costs of field conflicts that are eliminated by coordination. This research was performed to explore the costs of design coordination in concert with the benefits of eliminating coordination conflicts that arise in the field. A standard method to measure costs of coordination is developed for case study projects. Potential variables that affect this cost are evaluated, and the negative impacts of field conflicts are measured. Project variables that have strong relationships with coordination costs are identified to be MEP density [MEP cost/square foot (SF)], and plenum height, and exploratory models to predict coordination costs using these variables are presented. Three distinct types of coordination conflicts are identified with measurable increasing impacts and cost. These results help to quantify the level of effort needed to coordinate building systems, and help to provide a basis for detecting projects that are likely to have problematic MEP coordination processes.

Concurrent design and construction has been lauded for streamlining projects in terms of time. However, such an approach may actually make projects more uncertain and complex than the traditional sequential design and construction process. The main sources of risk that have been identified with concurrent design and construction are iterative cycles that result from unanticipated errors and changes and their subsequent impacts on project performance. As an effort to address these detrimental impacts, a framework for quality and change management that identifies those negative iterative cycles is proposed. The proposed framework is incorporated into the system dynamics model of dynamic planning and control methodology (DPM), which has been developed to evaluate negative impacts of errors and changes on construction performance. Relevant to practitioners and researchers, the potential of DPM as a robust design and construction planning methodology that could effectively deal with errors and changes inherent in the design and construction process is demonstrated through a case study involving the Treble Cove road bridge in Massachusetts.

The overall goal of this research project was to improve an organization’s core competency in construction project management in a focused and systematic manner, with the help of a formalized education and training model. This paper describes the development of such a model for education and training standards for career development at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The need for this model was driven by the tremendous increase in the volume of construction work at SNL (post $9∕11$ ) along with several other factors [i.e., self-governance, customer feedback, and a new Department of Energy Order (413.3) for the handling of program and project management capital assets acquisition]. The goal of this research was to create a defined procedure to identify and quantify project management gaps and strengths, and then to develop a process to succinctly characterize each Sandia model participant’s background qualification. This was achieved by administering a survey followed by a questionnaire whose results led to a customized training and development path, tracked both by individual and by department. Tools to address gaps were then identified and a role-task-competency hierarchy was created called the Sandia Project Management Career Development Academy model.

Construction contractors have significant constructability expertise to contribute to the design process of projects. To utilize this expertise most effectively, the right information must be made available to the design team at the proper point in time and at the appropriate level of detail. Current methods for utilizing construction knowledge in design have made significant advances to improving projects. However, they are typically rudimentary: unstructured, not very efficient, and rely heavily on reviews. Organizing constructability information according to its use in the design process will allow project teams to take the best advantage of the construction expertise. This paper introduces a model for organizing constructability information based on timing and levels of detail. The model differs from current approaches because of this focus. How the model was developed is described. It is tested on six case study projects to assess applicability on different projects. An illustrative example is provided using a detailed case study of the Pentagon renovation project to show how the model can be used as a metric to guide constructability input during design.

The systems that historically have been used to collect data for time studies of construction operations are manual in nature and limited to the observer’s field of view. Global Positioning System (GPS) technology incorporated into an onboard instrumentation system can be used to autonomously collect position and velocity data without the field of view limitation. Data must be collected at a short time interval to provide the level of detail necessary for operations analysis. Thus the issue becomes managing the data and identifying the relatively key records that mark the start and stop of activities. A field observer identifies the key times in real time with instantaneous decisions of when one activity stops and the next starts based on enormous volumes of visual information. This work developed a methodology for making equivalent decisions based on GPS data and presents the procedures developed to identify the key records necessary to calculate activity durations. A case study is used to illustrate application of the system to an earthmoving operation. Also, it is postulated how the information can be used in discrete event simulation.

There exist several reasons for construction firms to expand their business into international markets. But the complex international environment is affected by diverse factors and creates risks that are not well understood by companies that are active mostly in domestic markets. It is therefore essential for construction companies to follow a disciplined and well-informed strategy when deciding whether to enter international markets. Company strengths relative to conducting business in international markets, the threats and opportunities associated with overseas work, and the costs and benefits of undertaking construction projects in specific countries need to be considered in this decision. The interactions between the complex factors can be structured in a model that can help one to make a rational judgment. The International Expansion Decision Model developed in this study is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) improved by the addition of a Delphi survey. The main objective of this research study is to facilitate the entry decision into foreign markets and to highlight the importance of the factors involved in this decision. This study is of relevance to practitioners as it allows executives of construction companies to test if their company is ready for expansion into international markets in general and into a specific country in particular. It is also of relevance to researchers as it demonstrates the successful use of the combined Delphi and AHP methods.

The objective of this technical note is to illustrate the application of fuzzy expert systems to the modeling of a practical problem—that of predicting the labor productivity of two common industrial construction activities: rigging pipe and welding pipe. This note illustrates how to develop and test such a model, given the realistic constraints of subjective assessments, multiple contributing factors, and limitations on data sets. The factors that affect the productivity of each activity are identified, and fuzzy membership functions and expert rules are developed. The models are validated using data collected from an actual construction project. The resulting models are found to have high linguistic prediction accuracies. This note is of relevance to researchers by demonstrating how a fuzzy expert system can be developed and tested. It is of relevance to industry practitioners by illustrating how fuzzy logic and expert systems modeling can be exploited to help them solve real world problems.