Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

This article presents a series of results that emerged from the implementation of the first phase of a Continuous Improvement study applied to a particular housing construction project. As a result of the study, it was possible to determine the relationship between the most common construction defects in ceramic cladding. Of 7 statistical analysis tools, the 4 most relevant have been selected and systematically used during the present work: data collection sheet, stratification, histogram, and Pareto diagram. The results show that there are 25 main types of detected—and most recurring—incidences of defects in housing construction. From the total sum of accounted defects, 87.5% occur during the execution process, whereas almost half—47.6%—are caused by or derived from improper grout preparation or faulty application. This relation of defects can be used by professionals in the construction industry to implement Continuous Improvement projects focused on minimizing failures. It can also be used as a checklist to carry out quality control of ceramic cladding.

Different features included in public-private partnership (PPP) highway projects such as limited liability of the leveraged firm and government support mechanisms [e.g., price adjustment clauses (PACs)] result in asymmetric project value payoff functions that cannot be properly assessed by traditional methods such as discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis. To overcome this issue, an option-pricing framework is developed that enables financial assessment of different types of road projects in the presence of different government support mechanisms. However, this paper focuses on evaluation of highway projects under the presence of PACs. By providing a framework for calculating the value of government support mechanisms and long-term material and energy contracts, this model can help road agencies and contractors with choosing effective hedging strategies.

There has been an increasing demand for maximizing the environmental, social, and economic value of built infrastructure. However, a major gap still exists in the area of value analysis; there is no formal model to conceptualize, represent, and reason about value and valuation of built infrastructure. This paper presents the authors’ work in the area of formal axiology-based value analysis of building projects. Axiology is a theory of value and worth. The formal axiology is a theory-based, semantic model for analyzing and assessing the value (worth) of building projects based on the environmental, social, and economic values of stakeholders (e.g., energy conservation, safety, economic growth). The first step towards developing the formal axiology is discovering stakeholder values in the context of building projects. Value discovery is the process of identifying the values that are relevant to a particular system. In this paper, the authors focus on presenting their value-discovery work for residential, commercial, and educational building projects. Stakeholder values were discovered from project documents, value literature, and a stakeholder survey. The paper discusses the survey design, implementation, and results. Overall, the results show that, on average, all values are at least moderately important to all stakeholders. The results also show that although there is a general agreement on the importance ranking of values among stakeholders, there are significant differences in the ranks across different stakeholder groups and across different project types. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing both theoretical and empirical knowledge on stakeholder value discovery; it could facilitate value-sensitive decision-making by embodying stakeholder values into project planning and design towards better synergy between human values and the built environment.

Construction engineering is a vital discipline in industry practice, providing essential facilities and systems for modern society. Despite its undisputed importance, basic research intensity and focus has been declining, which is compounded by challenges in collaboration between industry and academia. This study therefore aimed to revitalize construction engineering by emphasizing basic research, exploring barriers and enablers, and collaboratively establishing an ambitious research agenda. These objectives were addressed via a dedicated research conference and workshop held in March 2014 in Seattle. The event outcomes included new collaborations for 49% of workshop participants. In addition, the workshop identified four fundamental attributes of basic construction engineering research, including the drive to further knowledge, to improve construction delivery, to serve industry, and to pursue sustainability. Ultimately, this paper presents a research agenda for construction engineering based on workshop participant contributions. This agenda is a call for action that focuses attention on global systems and sustainability (for example, creating and maintaining vast distributed infrastructure systems), technology and management (for example, designing for the hybrid technical–human nature of construction engineering), and research methods (for example, adapting interdisciplinary research methodologies for construction engineering research). It is intended as the starting point for junior and senior researchers, industry representatives, and government agencies to develop, participate in, and support their targeted research projects that endeavor to address a specific part of one of these major themes.

Product and process platforms have been promoted as possible enablers of increased productivity in civil engineering. However, such platforms are traditionally applied in mass manufacturing industries where production assets are employed in continuous production of uniform products, which strongly facilitates continuous improvement. The discontinuous nature of project-based production in civil engineering restricts such possibilities. Thus, if platforms are implemented there is a need for methods capable of evaluating the performance of integrated product and production process configurations in specific projects. A possibility, explored in this paper, is to use database-driven simulation. As a case study, a configurable simulation model, based on standardized process patterns and values stored in a platform, has been developed of the production for a bridge concept. The presented results provide evidence that database-driven simulation can support efficient platform evaluation and development by integrating product and process information, even in discontinuous, project-based industrial sectors. The results specifically demonstrate that this approach can be used to evaluate effects of different configurations of construction methods on working time requirements without time-consuming updates of models.

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) have been widely applied around the world in the provision of public works and services. Although a large number of PPP projects in different sectors have been successfully developed with increased value for money to governmental departments and the general public, concessions of many other projects in both developed and developing countries have been terminated before the originally scheduled date because of various unforeseen risks. To address the key issue of compensation to the concessionaire in such an early-terminated concession, this paper develops a compensation estimation framework and a corresponding mathematical model through a market value approach. A compensation model is developed using the discounted cash flow technique, which integrates multiple input and output variables and probabilistic techniques, such as regression analysis, maximum likelihood analysis, and Monte Carlo simulation, to analyze and tackle the uncertainties of social-economic variables and project performance variables. An example is provided to illustrate the applicability of this compensation estimation model; it shows that this model can take advantage of historical data from early-terminated projects and improve accuracy in measuring uncertainties associated with social-economic variables and project performance variables. This compensation model provides a fair compensation system to safeguard the benefits of both the concessionaire and the host government of the PPP project. It is expected that this model will assist the host government and concessionaire in effectively solving the compensation issue in future early-terminated PPP projects in a fair way.

The engineering-procurement-construction (EPC) approach has been increasingly adopted in competitive international markets, in which design management is critical to project performances. Existing studies have embraced a partnering strategy to integrate stakeholders’ diverse expertise and need for better solutions to design. This study has quantitatively investigated the cause-effect relationships among partnering, design management, and project outcomes by developing and testing a conceptual model. With the support of data collected from Chinese construction companies as EPC contractors, this study reveals that contractors’ design management should focus on four factors: planning and executing, resolving disputes, optimizing design, and promoting techniques . Path analysis confirms that partnering can not only significantly facilitate design management, thereby improving project outcomes, but also directly promote project performances and create long-term strategic benefits. Canonical correlation analysis further quantifies the different extents to which two groups of partnering critical success factors (CSFs) interact with four design management factors, together with their effects on five indicators of project outcomes. This research has important primary contributions to the body of knowledge by establishing interdisciplinary linkages among knowledge areas of partnering, design management and international project delivery, demonstrating the multiorganizational dynamics in delivering international EPC projects on a holistic view. Understanding the in-depth underlying causes to improve design management will be crucial for EPC contractors to optimally integrate all stakeholders’ resources into designs by considering project lifecycle processes.

Although the number of fatalities experienced by the U.S. construction industry has been declining, the magnitude of the decrease has stagnated in recent years. Several improvements have been realized in visualizing construction-project information through building information modeling (BIM). One improvement in construction safety can be found in the collection, analysis, and visualization of safety-leading indicator data including near-miss events. Furthermore, the visualization of reported near misses can assist safety managers to identify high-frequency and high-severity events within a construction site for mitigation or hazard removal techniques. The objective of this research is to provide a framework for near-miss data collection and visualization within a BIM platform. A near-miss database was created in a commercially available BIM design software to allow construction-site personnel to report near misses and visualize within an existing BIM. Algorithms were created to enable filtering for visualization based on user input properties of each individual near miss. A feasibility study for the created tool was conducted with an expert review panel of experienced safety managers. Contributions of this research include a near-miss visualization user interface allows construction personnel to view near misses throughout a construction project to identify hazardous areas and frequency of near misses as well as feasibility study data of the created tool.

Recent socioeconomic changes have created and intensified paradoxical organizational tensions that companies in numerous industries, including the construction sector, need to address when organizing and managing their activities. The nature of these tensions has not been sufficiently explored in the existing construction management literature. Thus, this study analyzes tensions between control and flexibility at different organizational interfaces, as perceived by the managers of three large infrastructure projects that were parts of two different megaprojects in Sweden. The empirical findings highlight several tensions within three types of interfaces, that is, external, intraorganizational, and interorganizational tensions, that are important for both project managers and project owners to understand. This paper contributes to the project and construction management literature by illustrating the importance of a systemic paradox perspective, which is obtained by combining the paradox literature and principal–agent theory. A systemic paradox perspective is required to understand how tensions between control and flexibility are interpreted by different parties and how tensions in different organizational interfaces are interrelated and may be addressed to avoid suboptimization.

Change orders are common to most construction projects. They can significantly increase project cost and duration, leading to more claims and disputes and ultimately creating an adversarial relationship among project members. Evidence has shown that a contributing factor to the inefficiency of change order management is the management process utilized in most construction projects, which always relates to suboptimal allocation of resources and unnecessary procedures. Discrete event simulation (DES) provides an effective approach to streamline the change order management process by evaluating a series of improvement options. Based on a comparison of two prevailing DES paradigms, activity scanning (AS) and process interaction (PI), this paper presents an object-oriented DES model to investigate the change order management process. A case study has been performed to investigate the change order management process at a Midwestern land-grant university with the proposed simulation model, where the bottlenecks of as-is process have been identified and improved. The developed model employs PI paradigm rather than AS paradigm because the former is capable of capturing the real time state changes of change orders. Sensitivity analysis (SA) is also applied to examine the quantitative impacts of changeable variables to evaluate improvement options. The results indicate that PI paradigm outperforms AS in the investigation of change order management process. It is also expected that the developed model provides an optimization tool to support change order management.

This study describes an advanced steel beam assembly approach to improve the safety of structural steel workers compared with that of the conventional process in construction. The approach uses a self-supported steel joint that changes the shape of existing steel members, an automated wire control machine that supports the assembly process, and control by a worker on the work floor. Development procedures consisted of the following steps: (1) setting up the development direction, (2) designing and producing the prototypes, (3) assessing the proposed approach through mock-up tests and modifying the prototypes, and (4) verifying the proposed approach through field application at a pilot project site. Overall, the time and cost to assemble beams in the pilot project site were reduced by 3 days and $1365.32, respectively. In particular, safety was improved by 82.35% compared with the conventional process. The proposed approach is expected to be a practical alternative providing improved safety of the steel beam assembly process. Furthermore, development procedures involved in this study may be useful to researchers interested in developing advanced construction methods.

This paper brings forth from the literature a series of learning curve models and evaluates them through the lens of the construction industry. The review suggests that there is still no consensus on which model provides the best fit and predictability for construction data. As such, this paper puts forth a new model that is suitable for the modern construction industry as it accommodates for both mechanization and forgetting. The proposed model is similar to the Wright model (an exponential model of learning), but, through recursion, places more emphasis on recent data. The proposed model shows an error of less than 1% when predicting the cumulative average completion times in three out of four cases examined.