Search results for: construction value chain

Authors: Zdeněk Mikoláš, Zuzana Wozniaková

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In the 21. century it comes true, that competitiveness of the firm is - to a considerable level - influenced by its participation in the chain of suppliers, customers and partners and by the way how the subject cooperates in the chain. This is valid also for new forms of enterprise such as virtual organization or virtual firm. In the first part of the paper there are determined the differences between these forms of enterprise. Another part will bring methodological framework for analysis of the factors, that influence the competitiveness of the virtual organization from spontaneity and order point of view.

Keywords: abstraction, competitiveness, order, potential, spontaneity, virtual firm, virtual organization.

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Authors: Dzul Fahmi Nordin, Rosmini Omar

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This paper analyzed the perception of e-commerce application services by construction material traders in Malaysia. Five attributes were tested: usability, reputation, trust, privacy and familiarity. Study methodology consists of survey questionnaire and statistical analysis that includes reliability analysis, factor analysis, ANOVA and regression analysis. The respondents were construction material traders, including hardware stores in Klang Valley, Kuala Lumpur. Findings support that usability and familiarity with e-commerce services in Malaysia have insignificant influence on the acceptance of e-commerce application. However, reputation, trust and privacy attributes have significant influence on the choice of e-commerce acceptance by construction material traders. E-commerce applications studied included customer database, e-selling, emarketing, e-payment, e-buying and online advertising. Assumptions are made that traders have basic knowledge and exposure to ICT services. i.e. internet service and computers. Study concludes that reputation, privacy and trust are the three website attributes that influence the acceptance of e-commerce by construction material traders.

Keywords: Electronic Commerce (e-Commerce), Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Small Medium Enterprise (SME)

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Authors: M. Takhtravanchi, C. Pathirage

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In the construction industry, project members are conveyor of project knowledge which is, often, not managed properly to be used in future projects. As construction projects are temporary and unique, project members are willing to be recruited once a project is completed. Therefore, poor management of knowledge across construction projects will lead to a considerable amount of knowledge loss; the ignoring of which would be detrimental to project performance. This issue is more prominent in projects undertaken through the traditional procurement system, as this system does not incentives project members for integration. Thus, disputes exist between the design and construction phases based on the poor management of knowledge between those two phases. This paper aims to highlight the challenges of the knowledge management that exists within the traditional procurement system. Expert interviews were conducted and challenges were identified and analysed by the Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) approach in order to summarise the relationships among them. Two identified key challenges are the Culture of an Organisation and Knowledge Management Policies. A knowledge of the challenges and their relationships will help project manager and stakeholders to have a better understanding of the importance of knowledge management.

Keywords: Challenges, construction industry, knowledge management, traditional procurement system.

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Authors: Zeeshan Hamid, Asher Ramish

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The purpose of this paper is to focus on security and safety issues facing by pharmaceutical industry globally when counterfeit drugs are in question. Hence, there is an intense need to secure and authenticate pharmaceutical products in the emerging counterfeit product market. This paper will elaborate the application of radio frequency identification (RFID) in pharmaceutical industry and to identify its key benefits for patient’s care. The benefits are: help to co-ordinate the stream of supplies, accuracy in chains of supplies, maintaining trustworthy information, to manage the operations in appropriate and timely manners and finally deliver the genuine drug to patient. It is discussed that how RFID supported supply chain information sharing (SCIS) helps to combat against counterfeit drugs. And a solution how to tag pharmaceutical products; since, some products prevent RFID implementation in this industry. In this paper, a proposed model for pharma industry distribution suggested to combat against the counterfeit drugs when they are in supply chain.

Keywords: Supply chain, RFID, pharmaceutical industry, counterfeit drugs, patients care.

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Authors: Sareh Rajabi, Taha Anjamrooz, Salwa Bheiry

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Sustainability of construction projects is an important issue to be addressed since the sector will continue to be developed in the coming years, especially in developing countries. Thus, it is significant to discover approaches and solutions for improving sustainability. Currently, the construction industry is the largest consumer of natural resources. This is the same in other countries in the Gulf region, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has limited natural resources such as water, electricity, etc. Recently, the UAE has taken several actions in order to implement sustainable initiatives within its construction industry. Within the industry, the contractors’ role is significant in promoting sustainable development by taking the responsibility to minimize their negative impacts on the environment and society, and maximize their economic distribution. In this research, sustainability will be studied as an important key to bring competitive advantages to contracting organizations. The contractors should understand the need to improve their sustainable performance in order to expand their business competitiveness. Competitiveness at the construction project level refers to a contractor’s ability to compete for a project. There is less focus on how to improve contractors’ competitiveness by implementing sustainable construction practices. Based on an inclusive literature review on the relationship between sustainability performance and business competitiveness, this research will conduct a study of sustainable practice in the construction industry and the relationship between sustainability performance and business competitiveness in order to develop a framework for evaluating how contractors can improve their competitiveness in terms of more efficient processes, enhancements in productivity, and lower costs of compliance in order to reduce the initial project cost and obtain market opportunities in the UAE. The research findings will provide a framework that can be a useful guideline for contractors to develop their sustainability policy, strategy and practice for meeting the increased requirements for sustainable development in construction.

Keywords: Sustainable construction practice, sustainability, competitiveness, construction industry, contractors.

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Authors: V.R Gannapathy, S.K Subramaniam, A.B Mohamad Diah, M.K Suaidi, A.H Hamidon

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The picture of a perfect road construction site is the one that utilizes conventional vertical road signs and a flagman to optimize the traffic flow with minimum hazel to the public. Former research has been carried out by Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) and Ministry of Works to further enhance smoothness in traffic operations and particularly in safety issues within work zones. This paper highlights on hazardous zones in a certain road construction or road maintenance site. Most cases show that the flagman falls into high risk of fatal accidents within work zone. Various measures have been taken by both the authorities and contractors to overcome such miseries, yet it-s impossible to eliminate the usage of a flagman since it is considered the best practice. With the implementation of new technologies in automating the traffic flow in road construction site, it is possible to eliminate the usage of a flagman. The intelligent traffic light system is designed to solve problems which contribute hazardous at road construction site and to be inline with the road safety regulation which is taken into granted.

Keywords: Intelligent Traffic Light, Critical Zones, Safety Regulation, Flagman

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Authors: Junqi Zhao, Yongqiang Chen

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Preference for different conflict resolution styles is influenced by cultural background and power distance of two parties involving in conflict. This research put forward 7 hypotheses and tested the preference differences of the five conflict resolution styles between Chinese owner and contractor as well as the preference differences concerning the same style between two parties. The research sample includes 202 practitioners from construction enterprises in mainland China. Research result found that theories concerning conflict resolution styles could be applied in the Chinese construction industry. Some results of this research were not in line with former research, and this research also gave explanation to the differences from the characteristics of construction projects. Based on the findings, certain suggestions were made to serve as a guidance for managers to choose appropriate conflict resolution styles for a better handling of conflict.

Keywords: Chinese Owner and Contractor, Conflict, Construction Project, Conflict Resolution Styles.

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Authors: Kwok Tak Kit

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The construction industry plays an important role in environmental and carbon emissions as it consumes a huge amount of natural resources and energy. Sustainable engineering involves the process of planning, design, procurement, construction and delivery in which the whole building and construction process resulting from building and construction can be effectively and sustainability managed to achieve the use of natural resources. Implementation of sustainable technology development and innovation, adoption of the advanced construction process and facilitate the facilities management to implement the energy and waste control more accurately and effectively. Study and research in the relationship of BIM and environment assessment tools lack a clear discussion. In this paper, we will focus on the synergy of BIM technology and sustainable engineering in the AEC industry and outline the key factors which enhance the use of advanced innovation, technology and method and define the role of stakeholders to achieve zero-carbon emission toward the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. A case study of the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and environmental assessment tools in Hong Kong will be discussed in this paper.

Keywords: sustainability, sustainable engineering, BIM, LEED

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Authors: Balimu Mwiya, Mundia Muya, Chabota Kaliba, Peter Mukalula

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Factors affecting construction unit cost vary depending on a country’s political, economic, social and technological inclinations. Factors affecting construction costs have been studied from various perspectives. Analysis of cost factors requires an appreciation of a country’s practices. Identified cost factors provide an indication of a country’s construction economic strata. The purpose of this paper is to identify the essential factors that affect unit cost estimation and their breakdown using artificial neural networks. Twenty five (25) identified cost factors in road construction were subjected to a questionnaire survey and employing SPSS factor analysis the factors were reduced to eight. The 8 factors were analysed using neural network (NN) to determine the proportionate breakdown of the cost factors in a given construction unit rate. NN predicted that political environment accounted 44% of the unit rate followed by contractor capacity at 22% and financial delays, project feasibility and overhead & profit each at 11%. Project location, material availability and corruption perception index had minimal impact on the unit cost from the training data provided. Quantified cost factors can be incorporated in unit cost estimation models (UCEM) to produce more accurate estimates. This can create improvements in the cost estimation of infrastructure projects and establish a benchmark standard to assist the process of alignment of work practises and training of new staff, permitting the on-going development of best practises in cost estimation to become more effective.

Keywords: Construction cost factors, neural networks, roadworks, Zambian Construction Industry.

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Authors: Eva Nedeliakova, Juraj Camaj, Jaroslav Masek

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This contribution is focused on the methodology for identifying levels of quality and improving quality through new logistics model in railway transport. It is oriented on the application of dynamic quality models, which represent an innovative method of evaluation quality services. Through this conception, time factor, expected, and perceived quality in each moment of the transportation process within logistics chain can be taken into account. Various models describe the improvement of the quality which emphases the time factor throughout the whole transportation logistics chain. Quality of services in railway transport can be determined by the existing level of service quality, by detecting the causes of dissatisfaction employees but also customers, to uncover strengths and weaknesses. This new logistics model is able to recognize critical processes in logistic chain. It includes service quality rating that must respect its specific properties, which are unrepeatability, impalpability, their use right at the time they are provided and particularly changeability, which is significant factor in the conditions of rail transport as well. These peculiarities influence the quality of service regarding the constantly increasing requirements and that result in new ways of finding progressive attitudes towards the service quality rating.

Keywords: Logistics model, quality, railway transport.

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Authors: E. Kissi, V. K. Acheamfour, J. J. Gyimah, T. Adjei-Kumi

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Factoring accounts receivable is widely accepted as an alternative financing source and utilized in almost every industry that sells business-to-business or business-to-government. However, its patronage in the construction industry is very limited as some barriers hinder its application in the construction industry. This study aims at assessing the barriers to the use of factoring accounts receivables in the Ghanaian construction industry. The study adopted the sequential exploratory research method where structured and unstructured questionnaires were conveniently distributed to D1K1 and D2K2 construction firms in Ghana. Using the one-sample t-test and Kendall’s Coefficient of concordance data were analyzed. The most severe challenge concluded is the high cost of factoring patronage. Other critical challenges identified were low knowledge on factoring processes, inadequate access to information on factoring, and high risks involved in factoring. Hence, it is recommended that contractors should be made aware of the prospects of factoring of accounts receivables in the construction industry. This study serves as basis for further rigorous research into factoring of accounts receivables in the industry.

Keywords: Barriers, contractors, factoring accounts receivables, Ghanaian, perception.

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Authors: Aussadavut Dumrongsiri

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Westudy a dual-channel supply chain under decentralized setting in which manufacturer sells to retailer and to customers directly usingan online channel. A customer chooses the purchase-channel based on price and service quality. Also, to buy product from the retail store, the customer incurs a transportation cost influenced by the fluctuating gasoline cost. Both companies are under the revenue sharing contract. In this contract the retailer share a portion of the revenue to the manufacturer while the manufacturer will charge the lower wholesales price. The numerical result shows that the effects of gasoline costs, the revenue sharing ratio and the wholesale price play an important role in determining optimal prices. The result shows that when the gasoline price fluctuatesthe optimal on-line priceis relatively stable while the optimal retail price moves in the opposite direction of the gasoline prices.

Keywords: direct-channel, e-business, pricing model, dualchannel supply chain, gasoline cost, revenue sharing

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Authors: T. P. Lu, B. N. Hwang, T. Z. Liou, Y. L. Lin

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Developing a supply chain management (SCM) system is costly, but important. However, because of its complicated nature, not many of such projects are considered successful. Few research publications directly relate to key success factors (KSFs) for implementing a SCM system. Motivated by the above, this research proposes a hierarchy of KSFs for SCM system implementation in the semiconductor industry by using a two-step approach. First, the literature review indicates the initial hierarchy. The second step includes a focus group approach to finalize the proposed KSF hierarchy by extracting valuable experiences from executives and managers that actively participated in a project, which successfully establish a seamless SCM integration between the world's largest semiconductor foundry manufacturing company and the world's largest assembly and testing company. Future project executives may refer the resulting KSF hierarchy as a checklist for SCM system implementation in semiconductor or related industries.

Keywords: Focus group, key success factors, supply chain management, semiconductor industry.

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Authors: Erisasadat Sahebzamani, Núria Forcada, Francisco Lendinez

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Global climate change has become increasingly problematic over the past few decades. The construction industry has contributed to greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades. Considering these issues and the high demand for materials in the construction industry, Circular Economy (CE) is considered necessary to keep materials in the loop and extend their useful lives. By providing tangible benefits, Construction 4.0 facilitates the adoption of CE by reducing waste, updating standard work, sharing knowledge, and increasing transparency and stability. This study aims to present a framework for integrating CE and digital tools like Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual Reality (VR) to examine the impact on the construction industry based on stakeholders' perspectives.

Keywords: Circular Economy, Building Information Modeling, Virtual Reality, stakeholder engagement.

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Authors: Sareh Rajabi, Salwa Bheiry

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In general, Covid-19 created many financial and non-financial damages to the economy and community. Level and severity of covid-19 as pandemic case varies over the region and due to different types of the projects. Covid-19 virus emerged as one of the most imperative risk management factors word-wide recently. Therefore, as part of portfolio management assessment, it is essential to evaluate severity of such risk on the project and program in portfolio management level to avoid any risky portfolio. Covid-19 appeared very effectively in South America, part of Europe and Middle East. Such pandemic infection affected the whole universe, due to lock down, interruption in supply chain management, health and safety requirements, transportations and commercial impacts. Therefore, this research proposes Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to analyze and assess such pandemic case like Covid-19 and its impacts on the construction projects. The AHP technique uses four sub-criteria: Health and safety, commercial risk, completion risk and contractual risk to evaluate the project and program. The result will provide the decision makers with information which project has higher or lower risk in case of Covid-19 and pandemic scenario. Therefore, the decision makers can have most feasible solution based on effective weighted criteria for project selection within their portfolio to match with the organization’s strategies.

Keywords: Portfolio management, risk management, COVID-19, analytical hierarchy process technique.

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Authors: Danijela Tuljak-Suban, Valter Suban

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Food as perishable goods represents a specific and sensitive part in the supply chain theory, since changing physical or chemical characteristics considerably influence the approach to stock management. The most delicate phase of this process is transportation, where it becomes difficult to ensure the stable conditions which limit deterioration, since the value of the deterioration rate could be easily influenced by the mode of transportation. The fuzzy definition of variables allows one to take these variations into account. Furthermore, an appropriate choice of the defuzzification method permits one to adapt results to real conditions as far as possible. In this article those methods which take into account the relationship between the deterioration rate of perishable goods and transportation by ship will be applied with the aim of (a) minimizing the total cost function, defined as the sum of the ordering cost, holding cost, disposing cost and transportation costs, and (b) improving the supply chain sustainability by reducing environmental impact and waste disposal costs.

Keywords: Perishable goods, fuzzy reasoning, transport by ship, supply chain sustainability.

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Authors: Ali Alotaibi, Francis Edum-Fotwe, Andrew Price /

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Mega construction projects create buildings and major infrastructure to respond to work and life requirements while playing a vital role in promoting any nation’s economy. However, the industry is often criticised for not balancing economic, environmental and social dimensions of their projects, with emphasis typically on one aspect to the detriment of the others. This has resulted in many negative impacts including environmental pollution, waste throughout the project lifecycle, low productivity, and avoidable accidents. The identification of comprehensive Social Responsibility (SR) indicators, which combine social, environmental and economic aspects, is urgently needed. This is particularly the case in the context of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), which often has mega public construction projects. The aim of this paper is to develop a set of wide-ranging SR indicators which encompass social, economic and environmental aspects unique to the KSA. A qualitative approach was applied to explore relevant indicators through a review of the existing literature, international standards and reports. A list of appropriate indicators was developed, and its comprehensiveness was corroborated by interviews with experts on mega construction projects working with SR concepts in the KSA. The findings present 39 indicators and their metrics, covering 10 economic, 12 environmental and 17 social aspects of SR mapped against their references. These indicators are a valuable reference for decision-makers and academics in the KSA to understand factors related to SR in mega construction projects. The indicators are related to mega construction projects within the KSA and require validation in a real case scenario or within a different industry to demonstrate their generalisability.

Keywords: Social responsibility, construction projects, economic, social, environmental, indicators.

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Authors: Myunghoun Jang, Yongkyu Yi

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Appropriate selection of lifting equipments for a high-rise building construction project is one of the important factors to the project’s success. Proper position of a tower crane on a construction site is so important to be determined by an expert or an experienced construction manager who draws working range of a tower crane and moves it over a 2D (dimensional) site layout plan. But it is not usual to use 3D CAD, BIM or virtual reality for temporary facility planning or selection of a tower crane. This study proposes a method to use augmented reality to select proper position of tower cranes. An augmented reality prototype is implemented on a smart device to verify the practicability of the proposed method.

Keywords: Augmented Reality, Construction Planning, Site Layout, Temporary Facility Management, Tower Crane

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Authors: Susana G. Azevedo, Helena Carvalho, V. Cruz –Machado

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The supply chains (SCs) have to appeal to new management paradigms to improve their ability to respond rapidly and cost effectively to unpredictable changes in markets and increasing levels of environmental turbulence, both in terms of volume and variety. In this highly demanded context, the Agile paradigm provides the capabilities to SC quickly adapt to changes in the market requirements. The purpose of this paper is to suggest an Agile Index to assess the agility of the automotive companies and corresponding SCs. The proposed integrated assessment model incorporates Agile practices weighted according to their importance to the automotive SC competitiveness and obtained from the Delphi technique.

Keywords: Agile, Supply chain management, Index, Delphitechnique.

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Authors: M. Safa, A. Sabet, S. MacGillivray, M. Davidson, K. Kaczmarczyk, C. T. Haas, G. E. Gibson, D. Rayside

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In order to address construction project requirements and specifications, scholars and practitioners need to establish taxonomy according to a scheme that best fits their need. While existing characterization methods are continuously being improved, new ones are devised to cover project properties which have not been previously addressed. One such method, the Project Definition Rating Index (PDRI), has received limited consideration strictly as a classification scheme. Developed by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) in 1996, the PDRI has been refined over the last two decades as a method for evaluating a project's scope definition completeness during front-end planning (FEP). The main contribution of this study is a review of practical project classification methods, and a discussion of how PDRI can be used to classify projects based on their readiness in the FEP phase. The proposed model has been applied to 59 construction projects in Ontario, and the results are discussed.

Keywords: Project classification, project definition rating index (PDRI), project goals alignment, risk.

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Authors: Chongya Song, Kang Yen, Alexander Pons, Jin Liu

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In the field of machine learning, the ensemble has been employed as a common methodology to improve the performance upon multiple base classifiers. However, the true predictions are often canceled out by the false ones during consensus due to a phenomenon called “curse of correlation” which is represented as the strong interferences among the predictions produced by the base classifiers. In addition, the existing practices are still not able to effectively mitigate the problem of imbalanced classification. Based on the analysis on our experiment results, we conclude that the two problems are caused by some inherent deficiencies in the approach of consensus. Therefore, we create an enhanced ensemble algorithm which adopts a designed rank-based chain-mode consensus to overcome the two problems. In order to evaluate the proposed ensemble algorithm, we employ a well-known benchmark data set NSL-KDD (the improved version of dataset KDDCup99 produced by University of New Brunswick) to make comparisons between the proposed and 8 common ensemble algorithms. Particularly, each compared ensemble classifier uses the same 22 base classifiers, so that the differences in terms of the improvements toward the accuracy and reliability upon the base classifiers can be truly revealed. As a result, the proposed rank-based chain-mode consensus is proved to be a more effective ensemble solution than the traditional consensus approach, which outperforms the 8 ensemble algorithms by 20% on almost all compared metrices which include accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score and area under receiver operating characteristic curve.

Keywords: Consensus, curse of correlation, imbalanced classification, rank-based chain-mode ensemble.

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Authors: Omar Farahat Hassanein, A. Samer Ezeldin

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The construction industry is a very dynamic field. Every day new technologies and methods are developed to fasten the process and increase its efficiency. Hence, if a project uses fewer resources it will be more efficient.

This paper examines the recycling of concrete construction and demolition (C&D) waste to reuse it as aggregates in on-site applications for construction projects in Egypt and possibly in the Middle East. The study focuses on a stationary plant setting. The machinery set-up used in the plant is analyzed technically and financially.

The findings are gathered and grouped to obtain a comprehensive cost-benefit financial model to demonstrate the feasibility of establishing and operating a concrete recycling plant. Furthermore, a detailed business plan including the time and hierarchy is proposed. 

Keywords: Construction wastes, recycling, sustainability, financial model, concrete recycling, concrete life cycle.

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Authors: Ghaleb Y. Abbasi, Sufyan Al-Mrayat

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This study examined the contribution of 36 factors to building construction project’s cost overrun in Jordan. A questionnaire was distributed to a random sample of 350 stakeholders comprised of owners, consultants, and contractors, of which 285 responded. SPSS analysis was conducted to identify the top five causes of cost overrun, which were a large number of variation orders, inadequate quantities provided in the contract, misunderstanding of the project plan, incomplete bid documents, and choosing the lowest price in the contract bidding. There was an agreement among the study participants in ranking the factors contributing to cost overrun, which indicated that these factors were very commonly encountered in most construction projects in Jordan. Thus, it is crucial to enhance the collaboration among the different project stakeholders to understand the project’s objectives and set a realistic plan that takes into consideration all the factors that might influence the project cost, which might eventually prevent cost overrun.

Keywords: Cost, overrun, building construction projects, Jordan.

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Authors: Yuan-Jye Tseng, Jia-Shu Li

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To design a product with the given product requirement and design objective, there can be alternative ways to propose the detailed design specifications of the product. In the design modeling stage, alternative design cases with detailed specifications can be modeled to fulfill the product requirement and design objective. Therefore, in the design evaluation stage, it is required to perform an evaluation of the alternative design cases for deciding the final design. The purpose of this research is to develop a product evaluation model for evaluating the alternative design cases by integrated evaluating the criteria of functional design, Kansei design, and design for supply chain. The criteria in the functional design group include primary function, expansion function, improved function, and new function. The criteria in the Kansei group include geometric shape, dimension, surface finish, and layout. The criteria in the design for supply chain group include material, manufacturing process, assembly, and supply chain operation. From the point of view of value and cost, the criteria in the functional design group and Kansei design group represent the design value of the product. The criteria in the design for supply chain group represent the supply chain and manufacturing cost of the product. It is required to evaluate the design value and the supply chain cost to determine the final design. For the purpose of evaluating the criteria in the three criteria groups, a fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) method is presented to evaluate a weighted index by calculating the total relational values among the three groups. A method using the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is used to compare and rank the design alternative cases according to the weighted index using the total relational values of the criteria. The final decision of a design case can be determined by using the ordered ranking. For example, the design case with the top ranking can be selected as the final design case. Based on the criteria in the evaluation, the design objective can be achieved with a combined and weighted effect of the design value and manufacturing cost. An example product is demonstrated and illustrated in the presentation. It shows that the design evaluation model is useful for integrated evaluation of functional design, Kansei design, and design for supply chain to determine the best design case and achieve the design objective.

Keywords: Design evaluation, functional design, Kansei design, supply chain, design value, manufacturing cost, fuzzy analytic network process, technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution.

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Authors: M. C. Pardo-Ferreira, J. C. Rubio-Romero, M. Martínez-Rojas

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Resilience Engineering is a new paradigm of safety management that proposes to change the way of managing the safety to focus on the things that go well instead of the things that go wrong. Many complex and high-risk sectors such as air traffic control, health care, nuclear power plants, railways or emergencies, have applied this new vision of safety and have obtained very positive results. In the construction sector, safety management continues to be a problem as indicated by the statistics of occupational injuries worldwide. Therefore, it is important to improve safety management in this sector. For this reason, it is proposed to apply Resilience Engineering to the construction sector. The Construction Phase Health and Safety Plan emerges as a key element for the planning of safety management. One of the key tools of Resilience Engineering is the Resilience Assessment Grid that allows measuring the four essential abilities (respond, monitor, learn and anticipate) for resilient performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop a questionnaire based on the Resilience Assessment Grid, specifically on the ability to learn, to assess whether a Construction Phase Health and Safety Plans helps companies in a construction site to implement this ability. The research process was divided into four stages: (i) initial design of a questionnaire, (ii) validation of the content of the questionnaire, (iii) redesign of the questionnaire and (iii) application of the Delphi method. The questionnaire obtained could be used as a tool to help construction companies to evolve from Safety-I to Safety-II. In this way, companies could begin to develop the ability to learn, which will serve as a basis for the development of the other abilities necessary for resilient performance. The following steps in this research are intended to develop other questions that allow evaluating the rest of abilities for resilient performance such as monitoring, learning and anticipating.

Keywords: Resilience engineering, construction sector, resilience assessment grid, construction phase health and safety plan.

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Authors: Rebecca Angeles

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This case study features the Kuehne + Nagel PharmaChain solution for ‘cold chain’ pharmaceutical and biologic product shipments with IOT-enabled features for shipment temperature and location tracking. Using the case study method and content analysis, this research project investigates the application of the structurational model of technology theory introduced by Orlikowski in order to interpret the firm’s entry and participation in the IOT-impelled marketplace.

Keywords: Internet of things, IoT, radio frequency identification, supply chain management, business intelligence.

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Authors: H. J. Yang, R. Z. Jin, I. J. Park, C. T. Hyun

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There has been gradual progress of late in construction projects, particularly in big-scale megaprojects. Due to the long-term construction period, however, with large-scale budget investment, lack of construction management technologies, and increase in the incomplete elements of project schedule management, a plan to conduct efficient operations and to ensure business safety is required. In particular, as the project management information system (PMIS) is meant for managing a single project centering on the construction phase, there is a limitation in the management of program-scale businesses like megaprojects. Thus, a program management information system (PgMIS) that includes program-level management technologies is needed to manage multiple projects. In this study, a support tool was developed for managing the cost and schedule information occurring in the construction phase, at the program level. In addition, a case study on the developed support tool was conducted to verify the usability of the system. With the use of the developed support tool program, construction managers can monitor the progress of the entire project and of the individual subprojects in real time.

Keywords: Cost∙Schedule integration management, Supporting Tool, UI, WBS, CBS, introduce PgMIS (Program Management Information System), PMIS (Project Management Information System)

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Authors: Mehdi Seifbarghy, Sajjad Jalali, Seyed Habib A. Rahmati

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Recently studies in area of supply chain network (SCN) have focused on the disruption issues in distribution systems. Also this paper extends the previous literature by providing a new biobjective model for cost minimization of designing a three echelon SCN across normal and failure scenarios with considering multi capacity option for manufacturers and distribution centers. Moreover, in order to solve the problem by means of LINGO software, novel model will be reformulated through a branch of LP-Metric method called Min-Max approach.

Keywords: Scenario programming, Distribution, Multi-echelon supply chain design, Reliable facility

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Authors: Muhammad Jamaluddin Thaheem, Alberto De Marco

Abstract:

The area of Project Risk Management (PRM) has been extensively researched, and the utilization of various tools and techniques for managing risk in several industries has been sufficiently reported. Formal and systematic PRM practices have been made available for the construction industry. Based on such body of knowledge, this paper tries to find out the global picture of PRM practices and approaches with the help of a survey to look into the usage of PRM techniques and diffusion of software tools, their level of maturity, and their usefulness in the construction sector. Results show that, despite existing techniques and tools, their usage is limited: software tools are used only by a minority of respondents and their cost is one of the largest hurdles in adoption. Finally, the paper provides some important guidelines for future research regarding quantitative risk analysis techniques and suggestions for PRM software tools development and improvement.

Keywords: Construction industry, Project risk management, Software tools, Survey study.

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Authors: Daniel Y. Abebe, Dongyoung Lim, Gyumyong Gwak, Jaehyouk Choi

Abstract:

The design philosophy of building structure has been changing time to time. The reason for this is because of an increase of human inertest, an improved building materials and technology that will impact how we live, to speed up construction period and natural effect which includes earthquake disasters and environmental effect. One technique which takes in to account the above case is using a prefabricable structural system. In which each and every structural element is designed and prefabricated and assembled on a site so that the construction speed is increased and the environmental impact is also enhanced. This system has an immense advantage such as: reduce construction cost, reusable, recyclable, speed up construction period and less environmental effect. In this study, it is tried to present some of the developed and evaluated structural elements of building structures.

Keywords: Eccentrically braced frame, Natural disaster, Prefabricable structural, Removable link, SGSS.

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