Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

Incentives have been increasingly applied to align the objectives of participants in the delivery of construction projects. However, little research has been undertaken to systematically study the use of such incentives. This paper reports the findings of an empirical survey of the Chinese construction industry on: the need to apply incentives; frequency of the usage of incentives; how the incentive schemes are decided; and their effectiveness in application. The incentive schemes of the Three Gorges Project is also studied, from which an incentive matrix is presented that has measures tied not only to the final results but also extended to the whole construction process to facilitate providing early warnings, obtain continuous improvement, and ultimately achieve satisfactory project results for participants. It is recommended that future studies be encouraged to develop incentives according to project features such as project type, delivery system, project risk, and participants’ needs and their experience, enabling incentives to be applied broadly by participants to improve the efficiency of project delivery.

Existing studies on the performance evaluation by the delivery method generally indicate that the design build (DB) method is superior to the design-bid-build (DBB) method in terms of construction duration, cost, and quality. As opposed to the performance of construction duration and cost, where quantitative evaluation is relatively possible, most performance evaluations of quality are based on interviews with the owners. Therefore, this paper aimed at evaluating the level of design performance to conduct a quantitative evaluation on the performance of quality. To achieve this goal, this paper analyzed the impact of delivery methods on design performance in terms of the quantitative evaluation based on the case studies analyzing construction drawings and specifications of public multifamily housing projects delivered through the DB and DBB methods since 2000. The Delphi and analytic hierarchy process methods were used to develop objective standards and contents for evaluating the design performance. An analysis of variance test was conducted to analyze which delivery methods would have an effect on the design performance. Construction industry practitioners can use the results of this study in selecting a delivery method appropriate to the project characteristics.

While various factors such as float ownership, logic change, and resource allocation (FLORA) affect results of delay analysis, existing delay analysis techniques tend to ignore most if not all of them. To address this insufficiency this paper proposes a new schedule analysis technique called FLORA that simultaneously captures the dynamics of float, logic, and resource allocation in its analyses. FLORA analyzes not only the direct impact of a delay but also its “secondary” effect. The analysis process follows ten rules that are flexible and customizable. A case study is employed to illustrate its application. FLORA yields different and more reasonable outcomes compared to the window analysis technique. Each single analysis may also yield different or even conflicting results. By properly dealing with the current issues of schedule analysis, FLORA can be more reliable. Practitioners may readily accept its analyses and outcomes because they are able to specify, modify, and consent to the rules for schedule analysis to fit into a specific context in advance. Researchers may further evaluate the impacts of different factors on delay responsibility or apply FLORA to real projects to assess its strengths, weaknesses, and potential improvements.

Many transportation agencies have started outsourcing maintenance activities to contractors by means of performance-based contracts. These outsourcing contracts are intended to transfer performance-based risk from transportation agencies to private contractors for a premium cost. Even though such contracts provide numerous benefits to both contractual parties, there are equally many concerns with their implementation. Certainly, one of the most important concerns is how to quantify performance-based risk. This paper presents a general and flexible framework for quantifying the performance-based risk in terms of premium cost for different contract specifications and preventive maintenance and rehabilitation strategies. The framework developed consists of three modular components: (1) the reliability-based pavement performance model; (2) the preventive maintenance and rehabilitation models; and (3) the pricing model. The developed framework is illustrated using the current design and rehabilitation methods for flexible pavements.

Corporations of varying sizes and operations within the construction industry acclaim the contribution of project management applications that assist in business and operational practices. An integrated intelligent construction management application that enables process modeling and algorithmic analysis of construction process planning, interacts with a mainframe-based automated relational database system, and drives the project sequencing, scheduling, decision making and change management processes can introduce dramatic speed, simplicity, accuracy, and collaboration into existing project planning practices. Several research organizations and academic fraternities in concert with industry participation are focusing on the development of such futuristic tools as described above. However, evidence of such computing applications being used by the industry is minimal and a number of reasons have been cited by researchers for this. This study, through a review of the genesis, evolution, and future of computing applications in construction followed by an industry-wide survey, aims to study whether or not concurrent research agendas in construction information technology are truly sustainable from the industry’s perspective.

The research described in this paper extends the use of building information modeling (BIM) throughout the construction phase of the project life cycle. The owner is a military base that uses three-dimensional (3D) modeling for underground services and the footprints of the buildings. They were interested in determining the feasibility of capturing the construction process and related documents into a similar format. The research was conducted in parallel with traditional methods. The objectives of this project were to create a 3D as-built model, a four-dimensional as-built model, and attach the construction process information to the model for the owner to use after construction. A literature review indicates that BIM application stops at the preconstruction phase with a limited amount of research regarding data collection of the construction process. Significant contributions include practical 3D data collection methods and extending the BIM software products to accommodate construction process documentation. Results indicate that BIM software is not specifically prepared to accomplish these objectives and some modification to procedures as well as software were necessary for the BIM to capture the construction process documentation.

This paper compares the relative productivity of construction industry sectors with significant off-site fabrication with more traditional on-site sectors. The off-site sectors, such as curtainwall, structural steel, and precast concrete fabrication, consistently show higher productivity growth than on-site sectors. Furthermore, the value-added content of the off-site sectors is increasing faster than that of the on-site sectors, indicating faster productivity growth. However, the off-site sectors are not traditionally considered as part of the construction industry by the U.S. Economic Census, but rather as manufacturing. Ignoring the off-site segments of construction has led to significant underestimation of construction productivity.

Hong Kong’s construction industry has shown significant improvement in safety performance since the turn of the century. The number of industrial accidents in the construction industry has decreased from 11,925 in 2000 to 3,833 in 2004, which is an encouraging drop of almost 68%. However, the category “fall of person from height” has always represented a large proportion of the industrial accidents, particularly fatal accidents. In 2004, fall of person from height represented just over 47% of the total number of fatal accidents in the construction industry. The statistics show that although the overall number of accidents has dropped immensely, the same does not apply for fall from height accidents. According to statistics provided by the Labor Dept. of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, there were a total of 22 fatal industrial accidents associated with fall of persons from height in repair, maintenance, alteration, and addition works during 2000–2004. When analyzing these case studies, 12 common factors were identified for analyzing these case studies and strategies were suggested to prevent recurrence of similar accidents in each case. The top five strategies were: (1) provide and maintain a safe system of work; (2) provide a suitable working platform; (3) (tier) provide safety information/training/instruction/supervision; (4) (tier) provide suitable fall arresting system/anchorage; and (5) maintain safe workplace.

A good site layout is vital to ensure the safety of the working environment and effective and efficient operations. Site layout planning has significant impacts on productivity, costs, and duration of construction. Construction site layout planning involves identifying, sizing, and positioning temporary and permanent facilities within the boundary of the construction site. Site layout planning can be viewed as a complex optimization problem. Although construction site layout planning is a critical process, systematical analysis of this problem is always difficult because of the existence of a vast number of trades and interrelated planning constraints. The problem has been solved using two distinct approaches: Optimization techniques and heuristics methods. Mathematical optimization procedures have been developed to produce optimal solutions, but they are only applicable for small-size problems. Artificial intelligent techniques have been used practically to handle real-life problems. On the other hand, heuristic methods have been used to produce good but not optimal solutions for large problems. In this paper, an optimization model has been developed for solving the site layout planning problem considering safety and environmental issues and actual distance between facilities. Genetic algorithms are used as an optimization bed for the developed model. In order to validate the performance of the developed model, a real-life construction project was tested. The obtained results proved that satisfactory solutions were obtained.

Construction operations often face time constraints that influence the execution of activities, which are not addressed enough when modeling through general discrete-event simulation. This paper describes a simulation-based methodology to handle the time constraints including the cyclical break, preemption, and overtime use. In consideration of the variable number of breaks or variable break duration for different activities, an algorithm to determine the execution of the time-constrained activities is proposed, in which the concepts of time cycle and time window are introduced. The proposed algorithm is incorporated with an activity scanning simulation strategy to develop a construction simulation for modeling the time-constrained construction operations. Some examples are presented to illustrate and validate the algorithm, and highlight the effectiveness of the developed construction simulation. The study provides an alternative to improve construction simulation in modeling of the time-constrained construction operations and is expected to assist researchers or practitioners at analyzing or planning construction operations.

The Gaussian distribution and the $6\sigma$ principle have been widely used in the field of construction quality management with great success. This paper proposes a theoretical study on a new hyperbolic distribution using the $6\sigma$ principle to improve quality in construction management. The hyperbolic and Gaussian distributions are then numerically compared by estimating their important statistical properties, such as population in range, number of defects, yield percentage, and defects per million opportunities. The impacts of these factors are briefly discussed to give guidance to organizations in the construction industry on how to lower cost and improve project quality by prevention. A case study showing the cost data of a construction consultant company is presented. The data’s population in range and defects per million opportunities are estimated using Gaussian and hyperbolic distributions. In this particular case study, the hyperbolic distribution is shown to be more effective in quality improvement by prevention than the Gaussian distribution. This also validates the hyperbolic distribution as a suitable distribution for construction quality management.