Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

This paper examines common risk identification tools and techniques, risk classification methods, and common risks for construction projects. A systematic review and detailed content analysis of 130 selected articles from well-regarded and relevant academic journals published over the last three decades was conducted. The findings of the content analysis showed that the majority of the selected articles identified risks for construction projects—mainly infrastructure projects—in Asia and Europe, and in most cases the identified risks were either classified based on their nature or listed without any categorization. For identifying risks, combinations of different information-gathering techniques were predominantly used in the selected articles, whereas diagramming and analysis-based techniques were seldom used. The most frequently identified risks were unpredicted change of inflation rate; design errors and poor engineering; and changes in government laws, regulations, and policies affecting the project. This paper addresses the lack of a systematic review and content analysis of published articles related to risk identification, and it provides researchers and industry practitioners with data on the most common risks affecting construction projects.

This article presents a comprehensive project stakeholder typology model (PSTM) based on stakeholder salience attributes (SSAs). Stakeholders are considered as one of the major pillars of construction projects and management of stakeholders is essential to effective project management in the construction industry. A literature review of stakeholder typology and management models was conducted to identify all the different SSAs that are being applied. This analysis revealed important variation in the attributes, models, and frameworks. A questionnaire survey and semistructured interviews were conducted to fulfil the research purpose. Based on a Venn-diagram analysis of data, we suggest a clear and nonoverlapping SSAs framework to be used in construction projects. We also propose a project stakeholder typology model based on SSAs. The results indicated that PSTM divides stakeholders into 15 different types based on four attributes, namely Potency, Legitimacy, Urgency, and Proximity. It is expected that the results of this study can be used by practicing professionals such as project managers when identifying, categorizing, and managing stakeholders in construction projects.

The construction industry is facing a severe shortage of skilled workforce. Higher education is challenged to develop innovative strategies to help college students develop career-specific competency and accelerate the transition from novice to expert. Technology innovations such as virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) have been successfully integrated into learning and training programs to create authentic learning experiences within simulated virtual learning environments to facilitate tacit knowledge acquisition and workplace expertise development, which traditionally takes years of empirical experience and apprenticeship training. This study aims to explore potential VR and MR interventions in construction education and workforce development. It is directed at enhancing understanding of key differences between novices and experts and how VR and MR may facilitate tacit knowledge acquisition and expertise development to address the current skills gap in the construction industry. A simulation of accessibility design review and assessment for a tiny house was conducted via VR and MR mock-ups with the participation of both student novices and professional experts to collect behavioral and perceptual data using instruments that included a think-aloud protocol, a pair of pre- and postsurvey questionnaires, and audio/video recordings. Comparative analyses were conducted, and the results indicated that student novices, despite their lack of expertise, demonstrated comparable patterns of behaviors and achieved design review outcomes similar to those of professional experts with the VR and MR mock-ups. The findings of this study contribute to the body of knowledge by providing preliminary evidence of learning affordances of VR and MR in bridging experience-related gaps and suggesting opportunities for accelerating workplace expertise development among college students via technology intervention. These findings also have the potential to inform instructional design and pedagogical approaches that integrate VR and MR technology in undergraduate construction and engineering curricula.

In offsite construction, unbalanced distribution of resources can cause heterogeneity in the production environment and result in cost and time overruns. It is of particular importance to efficiently manage resource-constrained production in offsite construction in order to realize its numerous benefits over traditional construction. Although extensive research has been undertaken in the manufacturing domain to address unbalanced resource distribution, such studies in the context of offsite construction are sparse. To bridge this gap, the current study hypothesized that multiskilling and crosstraining of construction resources can provide a cost-effective solution to the problem. The aim of this research was to investigate the extent to which operational benefits can be achieved in offsite construction by using different labor skill set structures to address bottlenecks in production. A hybrid research method that adopts optimization and multicriteria decision-making techniques was used to compare performance measures associated with different labor skill sets. To this end, multiskilling policies were ranked and situations under which ranking results can be changed were discussed. The findings of this study reveal the performance and sensitivity of different multiskilling strategies pertaining to different criteria. This study aids industry practitioners in workforce planning and managing offsite construction. It also contributes to the body of knowledge by quantifying how performance measures and labor skill sets interact with each other.

Two critical factors that site managers have to control during construction are safety and quality. We envisage that the emergence of information and communications technology (ICT) systems is of great use in effectively promoting safety and quality and exploiting the synergy between these two disciplines. The objectives of this research were to investigate the relationship between safety and quality through the application of ICT. A system of key safety and quality performance indicators was compiled in order to evaluate the potential benefits. Safety and quality leading indicators were recorded prior to and after intervention process using a mobile application for communication, control, and command of construction of safety and quality (${\mathrm{C}}^4$). The results observed in the pilot study showed an improvement of 30% in quality and a reduction of 90% in unsafe activities during the implementation phase. These differences were tested using Student’s $t$-test and found to be statistically significant at the level of 0.99. Integrated safety and quality leading indicators contributed to enhanced safety and quality and had a potential improvement of up to 90% in construction quality and up to 30% in construction safety. The study contributes to the existing body of knowledge of the high potential of integrated quality and safety leading indicators in construction.

Workers’ attentional failures or inattention toward detecting a hazard can lead to inappropriate decisions and unsafe behaviors. Previous research has shown that individual characteristics such as past injury exposure contribute greatly to skill-based (e.g., attention failure) and perception-based (e.g., failure to identify and misperception) errors and subsequent accident involvement. However, a dearth of research empirically examined how a worker’s personality affects his or her attention and hazard identification. This study addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the impacts of the personality dimensions on the selective attention of workers exposed to fall hazards. To this end, construction workers were recruited to engage in a laboratory eye-tracking experiment that consisted of 115 potential and active fall scenarios in 35 construction images captured from actual projects within the United States. Construction workers’ personalities were assessed through the self-completion of the Big Five personality questionnaire, and their visual attention was monitored continuously using a wearable eye-tracking apparatus. The results of the study show that workers’ personality dimensions—specifically, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience—significantly relate to and impact attentional allocations and the search strategies of workers exposed to fall hazards. A more detailed investigation of this connection showed that individuals who are introverted, more conscientious, or more open to experience are less prone to injury and return their attention more frequently to hazardous areas. This study is the first attempt to illustrate how examining relationships among personality, attention, and hazard identification can reveal opportunities for the early detection of at-risk workers who are more likely to be involved in accidents. A better understanding of these connections provides valuable insight into both practice and theory regarding the transformation of current training and educational practices by providing appropriate intervention strategies for personalized safety guidelines and effective training materials to transform personality-driven at-risk workers into safer workers.

Similarity between project types is an important consideration in several contexts of construction management, including contract development, contractor selection, and project bundling. Projects that require similar types of resources can generally be considered compatible or similar and thus are prime candidates for simultaneous delivery through project bundling as well as other construction management applications. Unfortunately, there is no universally accepted, robust, and quantitative measure of project similarity. This paper presents a methodology to quantify the similarity between different project types based on their constituent pay items. Two project types are considered similar if they have in common a large percentage of pay items. Cluster analysis was first carried out to evaluate how different project types can be clustered into different groups. Several approaches were then proposed for quantifying the similarity between any two project types and the average similarity among multiple bundled projects. The paper’s framework can be used by highway agencies to serve as a guide in making or evaluating construction management–related decisions in various contexts including project bundling.

Understanding external stakeholders’ influence is essential to achieving success; however, little attention has been paid to investigating their indirect influence on projects. This study aims to explore indirect pathways that external stakeholders normally pursue to affect construction projects and to develop a framework of stakeholder-influencing pathways. The authors adopted abductive reasoning, using a preliminary framework. Based on the framework, four process-tracing case studies in the Vietnamese construction industry were conducted for data collection and analysis. Newspapers were the main source of data, complemented by interviews and other archive data, such as press releases, petitions, blog postings, and official documents. All cases confirmed the pathway through which stakeholders induce decision-makers to exert pressure related to a project. Also, some unanticipated results were found: first, two additional pathways, comprising two or three causally ordered mediators, can be employed to affect projects; second, stakeholders tend to use multiple influence pathways in which some actors, such as governmental authorities and the public, have a high rate of occurrence; and third, a mediator can be affected by more than one successor, whereas some mediators are capable of influencing various predecessors. Accordingly, the preliminary framework was revised to match the unanticipated results. This study explores a preliminary mechanism that transmits stakeholder influences to a project via multiple causally ordered actors. It is also the first comprehensive investigation into stakeholder influence pathways in the built environment. The findings can assist managers in stakeholder prioritization and anticipating their influences on projects.

Construction operations of construction equipment generate significant greenhouse gas emissions including carbon emissions and diesel exhaust emissions. While improving operational efficiency of construction activities implemented by construction equipment could result in significant emission reduction, there is still a lack of practical knowledge on the impact of operational adjustments applicable in real-world operations. The objectives of this study are to identify common inefficiency of real-world construction equipment activities and quantify emission saving potentials from operation-level adjustments of construction activities. In order to achieve the goals, three construction sites were used as case studies to identify common sources of excessive emissions on construction sites as well as possible opportunities for their reduction. As the means of quantifying potential gas emission reduction, a simple method that estimates equipment cycle time and can be easily replicated in practice is introduced. It was found from the case studies that a typical problem on a construction site is unnecessary idling of equipment. In addition, findings of this study indicate that the integration of careful planning on construction equipment activities with appropriate equipment selection could contribute to the reduction of carbon gas emissions as well as savings of construction cost. It is envisaged that this study contributes to the body of knowledge by (1) providing new findings in common inefficiency of construction operation in construction sites through field studies, and (2) quantifying the potential gas emission reduction with the simple method.