Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

The private sector has long been involved in delivering public sector projects, whether its role has been as a partner or just as a contractor for the government. Over recent years the interest in adopting public private partnerships (PPPs) has increased internationally. Many research studies have presented positive reasons for the governments and the private sector to welcome this form of procurement, rather than continue adopting the traditional options. This paper aims to explore and compare the key drivers for adopting PPP in China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (referred to as Hong Kong from here onwards). An empirical questionnaire survey was conducted in both of these administrative systems and survey respondents were invited to rate their perceptions on the importance of 15 different drivers identified. Eighty-seven completed survey questionnaires were returned for analysis. The findings indicated that respondents from China rated economy-related drivers higher, whereas Hong Kong respondents tended to rate efficiency-related drivers higher. China’s demand for more public infrastructure and services has imposed great pressure on the government’s budget, and therefore economic drivers were rated higher. On the other hand, with adequate financial reserve in hand and budget surplus over recent years, Hong Kong has tended to prefer paying for projects upfront, and hence efficiency was regarded more significantly. Among the 15 drivers, both of the respondents from China and Hong Kong selected, “provide an integrated solution (for public infrastructure/services)” and “solve the problem of public sector budget restraint” to be within the top three drivers. Despite the general agreement on the ranking pattern, the results of independent two-sample t-test showed that China and Hong Kong shared very different views on the driver “reduce the total project cost.” This driver was ranked rather high by the mainland Chinese respondents, but much lower by the Hong Kong respondents. This finding can be construed that economic drivers are in general rated higher in China as compared to that in Hong Kong.

Increasingly adopted by both public and private organizations, design-build (DB) has become a favored construction project delivery system, outperforming other systems in terms of cost, schedule, and quality. However, DB has been especially criticized by the public sector for practicing subjective evaluation, for requiring excessive resources, and for providing only limited accessibility to small and medium-sized contractors. In Korea, similar critiques have been raised, as these qualities have prevented public owners from benefiting from the potential advantages of DB. In order to address these challenging issues, the present research systematically analyzes the characteristics of the DB delivery system in Korea. Based on industry surveys and an extensive literature review, a qualitative system dynamics model is developed and used to propose and test hypothetical DB policy alternatives which are expected to enhance DB performance. Furthermore, after the appropriate customization processes, these research findings can also be applied to the industry settings of different countries.

This paper discusses the issue of unbalanced bid prices in unit price highway contracts. It analyzes the reasons contractors unbalance their bids and looks for ways that allow public transportation agencies to discourage this practice. It reviews the results of a study of quantity estimating accuracy of 462 transportation projects in Oklahoma, and finds that one method to reduce unbalanced bid prices is for the agency to ensure that the bid quantities used in the engineer’s estimate are as accurate as possible. Doing so reduces the need for contractors to unbalance to protect fixed costs and target profit on bid items that will underrun the quantity used in the engineer’s estimate.

Whole life costing (WLC) has become the best practice in construction procurement and it is likely to be a major issue in predicting whole life costs of a construction project accurately. However, different expectations from different organizations throughout a project’s life and the lack of data, monitoring targets, and long-term interest for many key players are obstacles to be overcome if WLC is to be implemented. A questionnaire survey was undertaken to investigate a set of ten common factors and 188 individual factors. These were grouped into eight critical categories (project scope, time, cost, quality, contract/administration, human resource, risk, and health and safety) by project phase, as perceived by the clients, contractors and subcontractors in order to identify critical success factors for whole life performance assessment (WLPA). Using a relative importance index, the top ten critical factors for each category, from the perspective of project participants, were analyzed and ranked. Their agreement on those categories and factors were analyzed using Spearman’s rank correlation. All participants identify “Type of Project” as the most common critical factor in the eight categories for WLPA. Using the relative index ranking technique and weighted average methods, it was found that the most critical individual factors in each category were: “clarity of contract” (scope); “fixed construction period” (time); “precise project budget estimate” (cost); “material quality” (quality); “mutual/trusting relationships” (contract/administration); “leadership/team management” (human resource); and “management of work safety on site” (health and safety). There was relatively a high agreement on these categories among all participants. Obviously, with 80 critical factors of WLPA, there is a stronger positive relationship between client and contactor rather than contractor and subcontractor, client and subcontractor. Putting these critical factors into a criteria matrix can facilitate an initial framework of WLPA in order to aid decision making in the public sector in South Korea for evaluation/selection process of a construction project at the bid stage.

In a construction project, the cost and duration of activities could change due to different uncertain variables such as weather, resource availability, etc. Resource leveling and allocation strategies also influence total time and costs of projects. In this paper, two concepts of time-cost trade-off and resource leveling and allocation have been embedded in a stochastic multiobjective optimization model which minimizes the total project time, cost, and resource moments. In the proposed time-cost-resource utilization optimization (TCRO) model, time and cost variables are considered to be fuzzy, to increase the flexibility for decision makers when using the model outputs. Application of fuzzy set theory in this study helps managers/planners to take these uncertainties into account and provide an optimal balance of time, cost, and resource utilization during the project execution. The fuzzy variables are discretized to represent different options for each activity. Nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) has been used to solve the optimization problem. Results of the TCRO model for two different case studies of construction projects are presented in the paper. Total time and costs of the two case studies in the Pareto front solutions of the TCRO model cover more than 85% of the ranges of total time and costs of solutions of the biobjective time-cost optimization (TCO) model. The results show that adding the resource leveling capability to the previously developed TCO models provides more practical solutions in terms of resource allocation and utilization, which makes this research relevant to both industry practitioners and researchers.

Construction schedules, generated by network scheduling techniques, often cause undesirable resource fluctuations that are impractical, inefficient, and costly to implement on construction sites. This paper presents the development of two innovative resource leveling metrics to directly measure and minimize the negative impact of resource fluctuations on construction productivity and cost. The first metric quantifies the total amount of resources that need to be temporarily released during low demand periods and rehired at a later stage during high demand periods. The second measures the total number of idle and nonproductive resource days that are caused by undesirable resource fluctuations. The two new metrics are incorporated in a robust and practical optimization model that is capable of generating optimal and practical schedules that maximize the efficiency of resource utilization. An application example is analyzed to illustrate the use of the model and demonstrate its capabilities. The results of this analysis show that the present model and metrics are capable of outperforming existing metrics and eliminating undesirable resource fluctuations and resource idle time.

This paper proposes a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach to construction hazard identification that facilitates systematic feedback of past knowledge in the form of incident cases and hazard identification. This paper focuses on two of the key components of the CBR approach: (1) a detailed knowledge representation scheme, developed based on the modified loss causation model, to codify incident cases and past hazard identification and (2) an intelligent retrieval mechanism that can automatically retrieve relevant past cases. The detailed knowledge representation scheme presented herein is designed to model both incident cases and hazard identification so that both types of knowledge repository can be retrieved simultaneously and adapted for use. The scheme also includes a linguistic structure used to facilitate indexing of cases. The retrieval mechanism is based on the concept of similarity scoring. In this paper, a novel scoring technique based on semantic networks is presented. A case study is presented to demonstrate and validate the proposed approach.

Performance forecasting is central to aligning an organization’s operations with its strategic direction. Despite the panoply of approaches to performance predictions, relatively few published studies address model development of financial performance predictions for the construction industry. By analyzing the preceding relationship between financial and economic variables and financial performance, this paper proposes an innovative approach to predicting firm financial performance. First, hypothesis tests using data for 42 development and construction corporations listed in the construction sector of the Taiwan Stock Exchange between 1997 Q1 and 2006 Q4 uncover useful relationships between financial performance and financial and economic variables. Second, based on these relationships, a three-stage mathematical modeling procedure is used for cross-sectional model estimation, which is subsequently refined to create firm-specific financial performance-forecasting models for four sample firms. The out-of-sample forecasting accuracy is evaluated using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The results show that the cross-sectional model explains 78.9% of the variation in the cross-sectional performance data, and the MAPE values in the forecasting models range from 9.54 to 19.69%.

Africa is a traditional overseas market for Chinese contractors. Since the launch of “going out’ national strategy in the new century, and with the support and control of the government and subordinate agencies, associations and banks, and innovative approach such as Angola Mode, Chinese contractors’ presence in the emerging African market continues to grow. Based on original empirical data collected through interview and questionnaire surveys, this paper analyzes the mechanisms the Chinese government has established to facilitate Chinese contractors’ entry into Africa and the perspectives of Chinese contractors about the African market in terms of opportunities and threats. Regression analysis based on existing datasets indicates that despite perceived opportunities and threats, Chinese contractors’ performance in Africa in terms of business revenue actually hinges upon the availability of construction capital. The study also reviews the market entry modes used by Chinese contractors, concluding that they prefer to establish a long term presence and opt to commit large resources. Overall, the paper summarizes evidence about the status and innovative approaches of Chinese contractors in penetrating the African construction market, and also characterizes the potential of the African construction market for Chinese contractors.

In this study, we focus on road construction and analyze technology development projects. Based on the business strategy literature and literature on technology policy, we test the relative importance of a firm’s strategies and government as a buyer and champion. Our empirical findings stress the value of government championing behavior. Our results show that in road construction, championing behavior is more important than public technology procurement for project performance. The results even suggest that government championship is more important than a firm’s strategic orientation.

This research study aims to identify strategic assets which currently drive and enhance the organizational capabilities of construction firms. There were 258 sets of questionnaires assessing the level of importance given to 106 substantial resources underlying six organizational capabilities of Thai construction firms that were analyzed. Using factor analysis, these 106 items were reduced to 14, which were termed strategic assets. These 14 strategic assets were then classified based on their influence on the six organizational capabilities. The results indicate that Thai construction firms concentrate mostly on developing excellent reputation, creating strong bargaining power with suppliers and subcontractors, and strengthening the firm’s financial stability. However, they do not give much importance to effective risk and investment management, continuous development and innovation, and explicit strategic management. These findings provide in-depth insight to comprehensively understanding a Thai construction firm’s capabilities. These 14 strategic assets should thereafter be used to develop a practical tool for managers of construction firms to evaluate their firm’s strengths and weaknesses as well as to identify strategic assets required to enhance competitiveness in the market.

Relationships between general contractors and subcontractors are generally formed on a project-by-project basis. However, because of the competitive nature of the construction industry, this traditional arrangement can result in adversarial relationships between general contractors and subcontractors, which can jeopardize potential or ongoing collaborative construction plans. To avoid this problem, close, long-term relationships between general contractors and subcontractors, as in strategic partnerships, must be established. Unfortunately, forming and sustaining such relationships can be time-consuming and cost-intensive. Furthermore, this type of relationship does not necessarily enhance cooperation or work performance. For contractors to successfully establish effective partnerships with their subcontractors, they must select the appropriate relationship by considering the different characteristics of the subcontracted work involved. Based on transaction cost theory, the findings of this study show that transaction costs incurred by general contractors and subcontractors vary according to the type of relationship established. Therefore, for the purpose of comparing transaction costs incurred in both competitive and partnership relationships, transaction-cost-based profit models for both general contractors and subcontractors are developed, respectively, for each relationship type. As well, by applying different strategies to maximize profits in each relationship, and by simulating the parameters affecting the nature of the subcontracted work, the conditions and relationships under which general contractors’ profits are optimized have been determined. Finally, based on simulation, practical guidelines for choosing the most appropriate relationship type are proposed.

During the last decade, “fuzzy techniques” have been increasingly applied to the research area of construction management discipline. To date, however, no paper has attempted to summarize and present a critique of the existing “fuzzy” literature. This paper, therefore, aims to comprehensively review the fuzzy literature that has been published in eight selected top quality journals from 1996 to 2005, these being Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, ASCE; Journal of Management in Engineering, ASCE; Construction Management and Economics; Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management; International Journal of Project Management; Building Research and Information; Building and Environment; and Benchmarking: An International Journal. It has been found that fuzzy research, as applied in construction management discipline in the past decade, can be divided into two broad fields, encompassing: (1) fuzzy set/fuzzy logic; and (2) hybrid fuzzy techniques, with the applications in four main categories, including: (1) decision making; (2) performance; (3) evaluation/assessment; and (4) modeling. The comprehensive review provided in this paper offers new directions for fuzzy research and its application in construction management. Based on a comprehensive literature review on the applications of fuzzy set/fuzzy logic, and hybrid fuzzy techniques in construction management research, an increasing trend of applying these techniques in construction management research is observed. Therefore, it is suggested that future research studies related to fuzzy techniques can be continuously applied to these four major categories. Fuzzy membership functions and linguistic variables in particular can be used to suit applications to solving problems encountered in the construction industry based on the nature of construction, which are widely regarded as complicated, full of uncertainties, and contingent on changing environments. Moreover, hybrid fuzzy techniques, such as neurofuzzy and fuzzy neural networks, can be more widely applied because they can better tackle some problems in construction that fuzzy set/fuzzy logic alone may not best suit. For example, neural networks are strong in pattern recognition and automatic learning while fuzzy set and fuzzy logic are strong in modeling certain uncertainties. Their combination can assist in developing models with uncertainty under some forms of pattern. Finally, an increasing trend of applying fuzzy techniques in the building science and environmental disciplines is also observed; it is believed that the application of fuzzy techniques will go beyond the construction management area into these disciplines as well.

This paper describes results from a study evaluating stringless paving using a combination of global positioning and laser technologies. A concrete paver manufacturer and a machine guidance solution provider developed this technology and successfully implemented it on construction earthmoving and grading projects. Concrete paving is a new area for considering this technology. A concrete paving contractor in Iowa agreed to test the stringless paving technology on two challenging concrete paving projects located in Washington County, Iowa during the summer of 2003. The research team from Iowa State University monitored the guidance and elevation conformance to the original design. They employed a combination of physical depth checks, surface location and elevation surveys, concrete yield checks, and physical survey of the control stakes and string line elevations. A final check on profile of the pavement surface was accomplished by the use of the Iowa Department of Transportation Light Weight Surface Analyzer. Due to the speed of paving and the rapid changes in terrain, the laser technology was abandoned for this project. Total control of the guidance and elevation controls on the slip form paver were moved from string line to a global positioning system (GPS). Results indicate that GPS control is a feasible approach to controlling a concrete paver. Further enhancements are needed in the physical features of the slip form paver hydraulic system controls and in the computer program for controlling elevation.

The high expectation of esthetic and functional quality in modern civil infrastructure has resulted in the increased demand for long span bridges. In advanced or developing countries, long span bridges such as cable-stayed and suspension bridges are considered even as landmarks that symbolize the prosperity or culture of the region. These long span bridges require higher level of design and construction technologies than other types of bridges. In particular, the construction of cable-stayed bridges involves precise and sophisticated operation of construction equipment such as derrick cranes. However, it is not easy to plan the operations of a derrick crane before the actual construction process takes place. Unexpected spatial constraints in the construction site may hinder the smooth operation of a derrick crane, which leads to lower than expected productivity and safety. This study applies interactive three-dimensional (3D) computer aided design (CAD) to the derrick crane operation for the purpose of identifying potential problems. Construction managers can have the two way process with the 3D CAD system to interactively test their construction plans and scenarios. The case study shows that the interactive 3D CAD system significantly improves the constructability of the cable-stayed bridge construction.

Time, cost and quality are the three factors that play a significant role in the planning and controlling of construction projects. The main barriers for their achievement are the changes in the project environment necessitating cost, time, and quality trade-offs. Literature has mainly focused on analyzing time and cost with little or no reported research focusing on models for optimizing construction time, cost, and quality jointly. Government agencies have recently started using new types of contracting methods which have placed an increasing pressure on decision makers in the construction industry to search for an optimal/near optimal resource utilization plan that minimizes construction cost and time while maximizing its quality. In this paper, a 0-1 Integer Programming model which enables meeting quality output standards and time and budget objectives respectively is developed. The clever use of binary variables allows us to solve many interesting and difficult problems and our ability to model complex problems increases tremendously when we use binary variables. A version of the model to minimize time meeting quality and cost objectives is applied to a road building project. Two alternatives versions of the model which enable to minimize cost meeting quality and time and to maximize quality meeting time and cost, are shown in an Appendix.

Women hold relatively few project management positions in the construction industry. Most studies conclude that women’s exclusion from the industry is mostly due to the industry’s male-dominated culture, but no study ever attempted to find out whether women are excluded from project management positions in construction because they are deficient in managerial competencies. This study evaluates the managerial competencies of female project managers by administering a competency assessment test and comparing the results with the managerial competencies of male project managers. The management development questionnaire was used, where competency is defined by subjective comparison. All respondents occupied project management positions and were assessed in 20 different competencies. The study concluded that female project managers do not differ much from male project managers in terms of their managerial behaviors but perform better in “sensitivity,” “costumer focus,” and “authority and presence.”