Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

Although the public sector has a long tradition of using the lowest bid as the award criterion for contracts, reliance on nonprice criteria is increasing. The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain how public owners use multiple criteria for the award of construction contracts. It is likely that nonprice criteria support the alignment of owner and contractor interests, and that bidder behavior should be affected by the likelihood of repeated contracts, and by the transparency of owners’ evaluation procedures. Data from 386 bidding documents reflecting practice in Swedish municipalities in 2003 are analyzed. A typical pattern is a 70% price weight combined with three nonprice criteria. Price formulas, translating bid prices into scale values, were found to be based on the lowest bid, bid spread, or average bid. Nonprice criteria were evaluated on either relative or absolute merits. Owners should be aware of the incentives that their selection practices create and view this in a policy perspective, whereas contractors should be ready to assess the short and long term values of nonprice features.

The adversarial nature of the construction industry contributes to the germination and manifestation of construction disputes. Negotiation between the disputants is most often the first attempt in getting disputes resolved. During negotiation, personality characteristics of the disputants affect their behavior and thus the outcomes. Understanding the negotiating behaviors and negotiation outcomes is therefore of both academic and practical value. This paper reports such a study conducted with construction professionals in Hong Kong. The Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II was used to measure the negotiating styles of construction professionals. Taxonomies of negotiation outcomes were developed through a principal component factor analysis. Three functional and four dysfunctional negotiation outcomes were identified. Based on these results, the relationships between the negotiating styles and negotiation outcomes were examined by the use of the multiple regression analyses. The findings suggested that the use of obliging, dominating, and avoiding styles are less influential in achieving functional negotiation outcomes. However, integrating negotiating styles is found to be useful to achieve functional outcomes and the use of comprising styles is a practical approach in resolving dispute. These findings are therefore supportive of the notion of the contingent use of negotiating styles.

The Gulf of Mexico offshore decommissioning market is the most diverse and competitive service contract environment in the world. The purpose of this paper is to describe the business, engineering, and market environment of decommissioning services in the Gulf of Mexico, and to provide a first-order approximation of the number of structures expected to be removed over a 25 year time horizon. Decommissioning activities associated with offshore production are an important and specialized segment of marine construction that has received limited attention in the academic literature, yet is compelling because few industrial sectors have such well-understood and widely adopted abandonment requirements. This paper should appeal to practitioners and researchers interested in learning the processes involved in deconstruction and the basic structure of the industry. The regulatory requirements and primary stages of decommissioning are reviewed, and the management, bid/tender process, and negotiation strategies are described. A life expectancy model of the number of structures expected to be removed from the Gulf of Mexico is presented, along with a discussion of the model uncertainty and the limitations of the analysis.

This paper aims at presenting a job performance evaluation process for construction companies. Human resource is a core economic asset. Organizations are responsible for helping their employees work at their optimal level. Job performance evaluations become an essential organizational activity, which can sustain employee performance. Existing literature has suggested that the construction industry does not pay attention to the importance of job performance evaluation. This paper presents the use of the analytic network process (ANP) to assign weights to a set of job performance criteria. It also describes a process for job performance evaluation. An example is demonstrated to illustrate how to construct the supermatrix for ANP.

The aim of this study was to compare materials transfer at a construction site, either by carrying manually or by using an elevator. Data were collected at a construction site by using two methods: continuous automatic collection of data on the use of the elevator, and measuring and observing the transportation of some products when different delivery systems were used. Health and safety risks were at their highest when transporting products manually at construction sites. Risks decrease when vertical (an elevator) and horizontal (a wheeled device) transportation tools are used. A similar improvement as in health and safety risks can be seen in efficiency results: The working time needed with the elevator was 41% of the purely manual handling time. When wheeled devices were used, the transportation time was decreased to 16%. The early use of a permanent elevator succeeded well and its capacity was large enough. The effective use of the elevator and wheeled devices require that pathways are in better condition than normally.

The purpose of the work summarized here was to improve the efficiency of the construction project management processes performed by the Spanish civil service, identifying and analyzing the main risks in these kinds of projects, and also establishing potential risk responses. The scope of this effort included a list of 96 risk events, categorized and prioritized first by impact, then by frequency. The most relevant ones are related to issues such as an inadequate prequalification system, insufficient training of public servants, or political considerations prevailing over real needs, among others. A total of 117 potential risk responses were identified, categorized, and prioritized by potential efficiency and difficulty of implementation. Each risk event was associated to a set of potential responses. The paper includes the top 15 risk events with its main potential responses, including qualitative assessments. A survey was carried out among Spanish public servants working in construction projects, to validate risk identification and to obtain a qualitative assessment. Moreover, a Delphi analysis was developed to validate the risk response identification and obtain a qualitative assessment. One of the conclusions is that small and medium-sized Spanish civil service agencies should work toward increasing their maturity in managing projects and, mainly, project risks.

Cost overruns in large infrastructure projects have been commonplace in the past decades. Budgeting for cost escalation is a major issue in the planning phase of these projects. In this paper, we first review various methods of forecasting escalation factor and study the changes in construction costs in the past 25 years by analyzing movements of a cost index. We then introduce a system for modeling the escalation uncertainty in large multiyear construction projects. The system uses a Monte Carlo simulation approach and considers variability of project component durations and the uncertainty of escalation factor during the project lifetime and calculates the distribution for the cost. System application is demonstrated using a numerical example. The system can be used by planners and cost estimators for budgeting the effect of cost escalation in large projects with multiyear schedules.

This paper attempts to use evolutionary algorithms to solve the problem of minimizing construction project duration in deterministic conditions, with in-time changeable and limited accessibility of renewable resources (workforce, machines, and equipment). Particular construction processes (with various levels of complexity) must be conducted in the established technological order and can be executed with different technological and organizational variants (different contractors, technologies, and ways of using resources). Such a description of realization conditions allows the method to also be applied to solving more complex problems that occur in construction practice (e.g., scheduling resources for a whole company, not only for a single project). The method’s versatility distinguishes it from other approaches presented in numerous publications. To assess the solutions generated by the evolutionary algorithm, the writers worked a heuristic algorithm (for the allocation of resources and the calculation of the shortest project duration). The results obtained by means of this methodology seem to be similar to outcomes of other comparable methodologies. The proposed methodology (the model and the computer system) may be of great significance to the construction industry. The paper contains some examples of the practical use of the evolutionary algorithm for project planning with time constraints.

Over 40% of Indian construction projects are facing time overrun ranging from 1 to 252 months; the reasons for which are being studied by researchers to suggest possible remedial measures. This paper identifies 55 attributes responsible for impacting performance of the projects. These attributes were then presented to Indian construction professionals in the form of a questionnaire. Statistical analysis of responses on the attributes segregated them into distinct sets of success attributes and failure attributes. Factor analysis of sets of success attributes and failure attributes separately grouped them into six critical success factors and seven critical failure factors. In order to understand the extent of contribution these factors have on the outcome of a construction project, a second stage questionnaire survey was also undertaken. The analyses of responses of the second stage questionnaire led us to conclude that two success factors and one failure factor: commitment of project participants; owner’s competence; and conflict among project participants contribute significantly in enhancement of current performance level of the project. The extent of their contribution has, however, been observed to vary for a given level of project performance. The analyses results are expected to help project professionals to focus on a few factors and get the optimum results rather than giving attention to all the factors and not getting the proportionate results.

Simulation models are built on assumptions, approximations, and estimates. Repetitive long-term projects such as tunnel construction provide opportunities to finetune approximations based on input from actual project progress. Bayesian updating techniques are an effective approach for improving the quality of simulation input and output based on what has already been observed. This paper presents a case study in which Bayesian techniques were applied to a simulation model of an actual tunnel project, the North Edmonton Sanitary Trunk. The study shows that using Bayesian techniques greatly improves the quality of projections. The novelty of this work includes the enhancement of the application of Bayesian updating techniques, the demonstration of simulation applications with a fully monitored tunneling project, and the demonstration of the extent of improvement to planning predictions from the use of actual data and the Bayesian updating techniques.