Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

Delay in construction projects is considered one of the most common problems causing a multitude of negative effects on the project and its participating parties. This paper aims to identify the main causes of delay in construction projects in Egypt from the point of view of contractors, consultants, and owners. A literature review was conducted to compile a list of delay causes that was purged based on appropriateness to Egypt in seven semistructured interviews. The resulting list of delay causes was subjected to a questionnaire survey for quantitative confirmation and identification of the most important causes of delay. The overall results indicated that the most important causes are: financing by contractor during construction, delays in contractor’s payment by owner, design changes by owner or his agent during construction, partial payments during construction, and nonutilization of professional construction/contractual management. The contractor and owner were found to have opposing views, mostly blaming one another for delays, while the consultant was seen as having a more intermediate view. Results’ analyses suggest that in order to significantly reduce delay a joint effort based on teamwork is required. Furthermore, causes of project delay were discussed based on the type and size of the project.

Recently, main contractors have shifted their attitudes about subcontract procurement to more strategic and long-term partnering philosophies. The objective of this study was to present a framework for subcontractor evaluation and management to help main contractors develop more strategic and productive relationships with their subcontract partners. As the strategic performance feedback model, the balanced scorecard concept was adopted with modification. A case study was also conducted to evaluate the framework with subcontracting strategy, performance indexes, weighting, evaluation of subcontractor performance data, and feedback methods. The research results obtained can be useful as a guideline of subcontractor management for long-term partnering and also to enhance overall productivity within the construction supply chain.

This paper evaluates the use of information technology (IT) and its impact on project and company performance in the construction industry. Using project level data from 139 projects and company level data from 74 companies, the current state of IT use in the construction industry was studied and statistical analyses were performed to assess the correlation between IT use and performance. Analyses are segregated by owner and contractor stakeholder groups and findings suggest that more IT use correlates with improved performance. Schedule performance has a strong positive association with increased IT use, whereas cost performance, although positively correlated, has a weaker relationship. These findings are in line with previous studies, adding to the research that IT has a positive impact on performance. Further comparison is made to show that IT use has increased over time among projects drawn from a similar sample population.

Project buyout management is essential for the transition from the preconstruction to the construction phase. It is during this period that the project team is formed; subcontractors are finalized; the orders of material and equipment are placed; and project plans are made. Despite its importance, few studies have been conducted in this field, especially for international contractors who face many complex situations in project buyout. This paper presents the study conducted for the project buyout management for the Chinese International Contractors (CICs) in developing countries, with focus on the project buyout management under different overseas management structures, and the key influencing factors. It discusses the characteristics of CICs in developing countries; investigates the project buyout management under different overseas management structures; analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of each overseas management structure to project buyout, and identifies the major project buyout influencing factors. The results of this research will benefit both the industry practitioners and the academic researchers in this area.

In project finance, raising sufficient funds via the debt channel is a key task for all project companies and sponsors. Before furnishing a loan, lenders typically need to ascertain the ability of the project company to service principal payments plus interest. This paper aims to establish a quantitative model to analyze default risks and loan losses in infrastructure projects. Acting as an assessment system, the model will help lenders evaluate their exposure to default risk by monitoring the changes in credit quality of the project company. The model uses a conditional credit rating transition matrix to predict the probability of default and the net present value technique to estimate the maximum default loss. The Hong Kong-Canton highway project is used as a case study to illustrate the techniques and output of the proposed credit risk model. The model can be used to assist lenders and investors in making sound investment decisions, price contracts, and allocate capital. Similarly, it can also help project sponsors evaluate those critical measures that they must control in order to secure favorable loan terms by minimizing the risk of default and improving the bankability of a project.

An integrated methodology is developed for planning construction projects under uncertainty. The methodology relies on a computer supported risk management system that allows for the identification, analysis, and quantification of the major risk factors and the derivation of their probability of occurrence and their impact on the duration of the project activities. Using project management estimates of the marginal cost of activity starting time disruptions, a heuristic procedure is used to develop a stable proactive baseline schedule that is sufficiently protected against the anticipated disruptions that may occur during project execution and that exhibits acceptable makespan performance. We illustrate the application of the methodology on a real life construction project and demonstrate that our proactive scheduler generates baseline schedules that outperform the schedules generated by commercial software packages in terms of robustness and timely project completion probability.

This paper develops a risk assessment methodology for construction projects by combining existing large quantities of data and project-specific information through updating approaches. Earlier studies have indicated that risk assessment is still difficult for practicing engineers to use due to the requirement of data on too many input variables. However, the availability of existing large quantities of data and project-specific information makes it possible to simplify the risk assessment procedure. Two main ideas are pursued in this paper to facilitate practical implementation: identify and evaluate the critical risk events, and develop a systematic updating methodology. Both epistemic and aleatory types of uncertainties in the data are considered, and corresponding updating procedures are developed. The proposed methodology is illustrated for the construction risk assessment of a cable-stayed bridge.

The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) has received the attention of many researchers because its general model can be used in a wide variety of construction planning and scheduling applications. The exact procedures and priority-rule-based heuristics fail to search for the optimum solution to the RCPSP of large-sized project networks in a reasonable amount of time for successful application in practice. This paper presents a permutation-based elitist genetic algorithm for solving the problem in order to fulfill the lack of an efficient optimal solution algorithm for project networks with 60 activities or more as well as to overcome the drawback of the exact solution approaches for large-sized project networks. The proposed algorithm employs the elitist strategy to preserve the best individual solution for the next generation so the improved solution can be obtained. A random number generator that provides and examines precedence feasible individuals is developed. A serial schedule generation scheme for the permutation-based decoding is applied to generate a feasible solution to the problem. Computational experiments using a set of standard test problems are presented to demonstrate the performance and accuracy of the proposed algorithm.