Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

The number of construction project managers initializing the use of the Last Planner System of Production Control (LPS), an operating system for project management designed to optimize work flow and promote rapid learning, is rapidly increasing, motivated by industry trends and testimonials of its perceived benefits. This study, limited to the building sector, is a systematic literature and testimonial search of the perceived motivations and benefits or challenges for choosing LPS. It substantiates the claims of those perceptions through a structured survey of senior and mid-level managers. Quantitative statistical tools infer that practitioners who use LPS experience more reliable planning, better supply chain integration, and less work flow time. However, managers who directly implement LPS are faced with external resistance from clients and subcontractors, and feel that their organization does not offer the necessary incentives for adopting LPS, indicating a possible clash of paradigms. The case studies and testimonials were available in the literature referenced in the paper, but the survey and the method for analysis are new and have not been published elsewhere, either wholly or in part.

Building from considerable empirical research in the general business literature, this paper quantitatively explores the view that the benefits of information technologies manifest themselves through improvement in work processes. In turn, better work processes lead to increased project performance. Using an overall sample of 133 projects (missing data make specific correlation sample sizes smaller) from the Construction Industry Institute Benchmarking and Metrics database, this paper analyzes correlations between technology use and integration, best practices, and project performance measured with cost, schedule, and rework metrics. Data are also used to assess the complementary interaction between technology use, work processes as measured by best practices, and performance. The findings show that there are limited significant beneficial correlations between information technology use and performance, slightly more significant beneficial correlations between best practice use and performance, and several significant correlations between information technology use and application of Best practices. Interaction effects of the combined use of information technologies and best practices against performance are assessed, finding several positive correlations, although limited data availability prevents robust statistical evaluation. Overall, the paper concludes there is evidence that the benefits of information technologies in construction are found through changes in work processes. This paper thus challenges more common approaches that attempt to directly correlate the impact of information technology use on project performance with corresponding implications for both academic and industrial attempts at assessment.

In Spain, the Ley de Ordenación de la Edificación (Building Regulation Act) has established compulsory warranties to ensure that buildings meet basic requirements with regard to functionality, general safety and structure, fireproofing, and use and habitability. Despite the requirements of this regulatory body, defects in newly built dwellings remain a pervasive problem, which has resulted in a plethora of complaints to the Instituto Nacional del Consumo (National Institute for Consumers’ Protection), which deals with consumer protection in Spain. In this paper, a total of 2,351 post-handover defects derived from four Spanish builders and seven residential developments are classified according to their location, subcontract, and element. The research reveals that the most common defects identified by customers at handover were incomplete tile grouting and incorrect fixtures and fittings in toilets. In addition, failure to apply second coats of paint to walls was deemed a problematic issue. Typical surface/appearance defects were found to include floor or wall unevenness, stains, mess, and small cracks and marks, primarily caused by lack of protection. In areas where fixtures, fittings, and finishes were of a similar nature, such as the kitchen and bathroom, defect types also arose. Determining the location, subcontract, and element where defects occur in residential buildings can provide invaluable knowledge about areas where builders are likely to make errors or mistakes or take deliberate shortcuts during construction. Thus, emphasis on quality control and supervision of subcontract trades, especially in the identified areas, and during the final stages of residential construction, are critical to ensure that defects are reduced.

As construction projects increase in scale and complexity, a major challenge is to ensure the effective transfer of relevant information to the right entities to make decisions, manage conflict, and solve challenges, which will allow organizations to achieve the goals of the project. Project teams whose members have the necessary attitudes, competencies, and skills to overcome this challenge are often termed high performing teams (HPTs). Building on recent studies about HPTs, this paper proposes a hybrid methodology that uses network theory and the jobs-to-be-done framework for the study of teams that aspire to develop high performance. Social network analysis (SNA) provides a reactive approach to the study of team connectivity and hierarchical leadership patterns and is complemented by the jobs-to-be-done framework that focuses on the drivers of the behavior of the various project organizations. The paper demonstrates these concepts by analyzing the characteristics of HPTs through a case study on a healthcare construction project. With this in mind, the contributions of this paper are twofold. The paper introduces jobs to be done as a proactive approach to initial team and work process design, given its focus on stakeholder motivations. In addition, the combination of SNA and jobs to be done allows the pursuit and iterative examination of both drivers of stakeholder behavior and their mechanisms of interaction, which generates more comprehensive insights than when each technique is used independently. Thus, this hybrid approach could facilitate the proactive design and refinement of HPTs.

Occupational stress affects the health and wellbeing of people who work. Using an online survey, opinions were sought from architects, civil engineers, quantity surveyors, and project and construction managers in South Africa. The contribution of this work lies in its examination of the work stress experienced by construction professionals in a developing country characterized by economic hardship and social problems, such as inequality and crime. Most respondents experience high levels of stress at work. Architects, more than engineers, quantity surveyors, and project and construction managers; and female, more than male professionals feel stressed. The extent to which professionals are able to control their job situations does not appear to have a major influence on stress. Tight deadlines and long working hours probably play a bigger role. All the professions would appreciate having more time to do a better job. Survey respondents do not expect managers and colleagues to consistently make their work easier, but do believe that they can be relied on in times of difficulty. Appropriate stress management should be implemented within the construction industry, and further research undertaken to explore the relationships between stress and type of work undertaken, and the effectiveness of stress management procedures.

Construction operations generate significant air pollutant emissions, including carbon emissions and diesel exhaust emissions. Controlling operational efficiency is the most important strategy for reducing air pollutants emitted from construction operations. However, current practices to assess air pollutant emissions from construction operations tend to ignore the variability of the operational efficiency that results from different resource allotting and scheduling. In this context, this paper presents a methodology for incorporating the analysis of operational efficiency into quantifying the amount of exhaust emission from construction operations. Case studies are presented to examine how and to what extent planning decisions affect the amount of air pollutants emitted from construction operations and to identify the impact that possible alternatives have on the schedule and cost of projects. The findings of case studies indicate that considering environmental aspects in the planning stage could contribute to a project’s increased integrated value, which includes schedule, cost, and environmental impact.

Construction projects are subject to numerous constraints of various types, including contractual due dates, resource limitations, and safety, financial, and managerial constraints. Most scheduling methods based on the critical path method (CPM) require that all project constraints be comprehensively defined and arranged into a single logical network for developing a project schedule. In real-life situations, however, there could be more than one option of execution, conditions, and/or precautions that may influence the logic of the project network and its outputs. CPM-based methods have been proven inadequate for scheduling in this kind of situation. This paper views construction scheduling as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), which is defined by a set of scheduling variables and a set of constraints. A CSP-based scheduling method has been developed to provide a framework for systematic constraint modeling and effective schedule generation. An illustrative real-life case example is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method. The results indicate that the present method is effective and efficient due to its expressive constraint representations and its ability to provide alternative schedules for multilogic project networks. This resembles more the nature of construction projects in which various types of constraints both conditional and unconditional are involved and many scheduling options can be derived. Comparing with the traditional CPM-based methods, the proposed method has the potential to transform the way construction schedules are generated and managed.

Accurate and frequent construction progress tracking provides critical input data for project systems such as cost, schedule control, and billing. Unfortunately, conventional progress tracking is labor intensive, sometimes subject to negotiation, and often driven by arcane rules. Attempts to improve progress tracking have recently focused on automation, using technologies such as three-dimensional imaging, global positioning systems, ultra wide band (UWB) indoor locating, handheld computers, voice recognition, wireless networks, and other technologies in various combinations. However, one limit of these approaches is their focus on counting objects or milestones rather than value. In this paper, a four-dimensional model recognition-driven automated progress tracking system that transforms objects to their earned values is examined via the analysis of data from the construction of a steel reinforced concrete structure and a steel structure. It is concluded that automated, object oriented recognition systems that convert each object to its earned value can substantially improve the accuracy of progress tracking, and thus, better support project systems like billing. The contribution of this study is an argument based on scientific results for refocusing future research onto automated earned value tracking, which is ultimately what is needed in practice.

In incompletely characterized environments such as construction sites, remote machine operation is the preferred—and sometimes the only—safe and efficient solution for the operation of construction machines. When it comes to the operation of remote-controlled construction machines, a human—machine interface is needed so that even in the case of an unstructured environment (such as a construction site), the operator can interact with the machine in a safe and efficient manner. The human—machine interface needs to have the capability of realistically representing a three-dimensional (3D) workspace that provides information feedback to the remote operator. Workspace representation methods that are currently in use have certain limitations—they are time consuming and labor intensive and require high-performance computers. A major objective of this study is the development of an efficient means of representing a workspace in 3D that has the capacity to provide interactive visual feedback to the operator of remote-controlled construction machines. To achieve this objective, the ability is required to acquire dense, accurate, and visually realistic 3D data that can be converted into high-quality models. This allows creation of a realistic 3D workspace representation of terrain, including objects that might be in proximity to the machine. For this purpose, this study proposes a multiimaging sensor data fusion-based system employing joint bilateral upsampling, which enhances the quality and availability of the information acquired in such an environment. The field experiment results show that combining data acquired with a complementary multiimaging sensor setup allows enhancement of the quality of the information available to the remote operator. The resulting task-specific 3D workspace representation can be successfully incorporated into the development of remote-controlled construction machines that require interactive visual feedback. This provides the opportunity to make human—machine interaction more efficient and to improve the remote operation capability by assisting the operator. Moreover, the proposed multiimaging sensor data fusion-based 3D representation approach has the potential for effective use in a broad class of applications within the construction industry.

In construction projects, construction managers spend a significant portion of their time gathering project data, assessing production rates, communicating with project participants, and tracking project quality. Executing those tasks manually reduces efficiency and can result in less effective project management operations. In order to improve efficiency of information process flow, various types of construction information management systems (CIMSs) have been introduced to construction projects. However, due to the difficulty of tracking fragmental and illusive data, measuring the cost and benefit of the implementation and evaluating the trade-off remain a challenge for construction practitioners. This paper’s contributions to the body of knowledge include (1) proposing a framework to assess tangible and semitangible or intangible costs and benefits of innovative construction technology application, (2) determining costs and benefits of the use of CIMSs by conducting a product-specific case study, and (3) summarizing lessons learned through the application of a CIMS from the first-hand users so that construction managers can avoid pitfalls in other projects. This study provides data collected during real-time immersion in the project as part of the project team over a 6 month period. The study found that the use of CIMSs, coupled with mobile technologies, increased efficiency and decreased clerical time of operations-level construction personnel, and thereby increased value to the project through improved allocation of managerial time. The internal observation and analysis provide a useful guidance to project managers who are interested in implementing CIMS in construction projects.