Real-time control of on-site construction, based on high quality data, is essential to identify discrepancies between actual and planned performances. Additionally, real-time control enables timely corrective measures to be taken when needed to reduce the damages caused by the discrepancies. The focus of the presentation will be on our work, which uses automated data technologies to collect data needed for real time control.

Early detection of schedule delay in field construction activities is vital to project management. It provides the opportunity to initiate remedial actions and increases the chance of controlling such overruns or minimizing their impacts. This entails project managers to design, implement, and maintain a systematic approach for progress monitoring to promptly identify, process and communicate discrepancies between actual and as-planned performances as early as possible. Despite importance, systematic implementation of progress monitoring is challenging: (1) Current progress monitoring is time-consuming as it needs extensive as-planned and as-built data collection; (2) The excessive amount of work required to be performed may cause human-errors and reduce the quality of manually collected data and since only an approximate visual inspection is usually performed, makes the collected data subjective; (3) Existing methods of progress monitoring are also non-systematic and may also create a time-lag between the time progress is reported and the time progress is actually accomplished; (4) Progress reports are visually complex, and do not reflect spatial aspects of construction; and (5) Current reporting methods increase the time required to describe and explain progress in coordination meetings and in turn could delay the decision making process. In summary, with current methods, it may be not be easy to understand the progress situation clearly and quickly. To overcome such inefficiencies, this research focuses on exploring application of unsorted daily progress photograph logs - available on any construction site - as well as IFC-based 4D models for progress monitoring. Our approach is based on computing, from the images themselves, the photographer's locations and orientations, along with a sparse 3D geometric representation of the as-built scene using daily progress photographs and superimposition of the reconstructed scene over the as-planned 4D model. Within such an environment, progress photographs are registered in the virtual as-planned environment, allowing a large unstructured collection of daily construction images to be interactively explored. In addition, sparse reconstructed scenes superimposed over 4D models allow site images to be geo-registered with the as-planned components and consequently, a location-based image processing technique to be implemented and progress data to be extracted automatically. The result of progress comparison study between as-planned and as-built performances can subsequently be visualized in the D4AR - 4D Augmented Reality - environment using a traffic light metaphor. In such an environment, project participants would be able to: 1) use the 4D as-planned model as a baseline for progress monitoring, compare it to daily construction photographs and study workspace logistics; 2) interactively and remotely explore registered construction photographs in a 3D environment; 3) analyze registered images and quantify as-built progress; 4) measure discrepancies between as-planned and as-built performances; and 5) visually represent progress discrepancies through superimposition of 4D as-planned models over progress photographs, make control decisions and effectively communicate those with project participants. We present our preliminary results on two ongoing construction projects and discuss implementation, perceived benefits and future potential enhancement of this new technology in construction, in all fronts of automatic data collection, processing and communication.

"We need to overcome the lack of space and infrastructure." Construction in the 20th century had been basically motivated by this need. It had enabled almost automatic financing on land as well as plenty of public investment. However we cannot expect such investment in built environment any more in the 21st century, when urban structures have been fully built. "We have space and infrastructures but want to make them better." We must find the new way how to strategically organize creativity on use as well as such users' want itself for sustaining investment in built environment. In this paper the outline of such a new way is discussed.

Construction firms have long sought success in the global construction market through diversifying revenue sources and project portfolios. The volume of international contracts has contributed to firms' sustained growth by mitigating the impact of the domestic market's cyclical nature. In spite of the importance of international construction, the uncertainty and dynamic changes surrounding global construction pose serious threats to global contactors. Over the last decade, the international construction industry has changed drastically in many ways, particularly including financial resource diversity, competition rules for the selection of contractors, and the terms of delivery systems requiring more competent total service providers. This paper investigates the important changes for global contractors through various documentation analysis as well as in-depth interviews with industry experts. This paper then analyzes the common strategies and lessons obtained from the cases of leading global contractors that have sustained their growth in the competitive global construction during the last decade. In addition, the authors further analyzed the comparisons between those firms and Korean contractors to discern any difference in sustaining their growth in the competitive market. It was found that those leading firms were quite proactive and responsive to changing markets by diversifying their market revenues to stabilize their revenue structure and enhancing their competency through a wide range of 'business convergence'. In addition, they significantly increased their upstream/downstream functional capabilities; hence becoming more competent service providers, able to grow in these rapidly changing market conditions. Finally, this paper benchmarks the critical strategies that support growth, which in turn can provide a strategic guideline for expansion into the global construction market.

Project leadership lifts management to a new level where projects are seen as strategic weapons that help firms to develop competitiveness. For too long, the focus on projects has been on short-term, tool-oriented management. There is a need for fresh understanding of project leadership and appreciation of its importance. A state-of-the-art review of research on leadership in project management is presented. Results of an aspect of a global study on leadership in the construction industry are discussed. The need for project managers to be effectively developed as leaders is underscored.

Lean construction researchers and practitioners have established a new paradigm for managing construction projects. This paradigm stems from insights gained by viewing project delivery as one kind of production and, inspired by the success of the Toyota Production System, leveraging Toyota's 'lean thinking' in the context of such one-of production. Premises of lean construction are that (1) production systems are riddled with variation, (2) variation can be good or bad, but most of it is bad, (3) most of this variation-good or bad-is self-inflicted; consequently 'lean' passionately promotes good- and relentlessly eradicates bad variation. This paper surveys a few of many lean construction means to manage variation. Lean thinking encompasses a lot more than thinking about variation, but that is the lens used here through which construction project management is viewed. Pairing these premises with lean variation-management tools may help readers broaden the insights they can gain from reading the lean construction literature.

This paper explores the ways in which collaborative working among multiple disciplines in building projects can be more effective and efficient. It focuses on the support that can be provided by the latest development in information and communication technologies. It also considers the growing interdependence between participants in the process and their changing roles as they harness the power of the new technologies in new collaborative arrangements. It is argued that collaborative working should be addressed holistically from the technological angle, the social angle, as well as the organisational angle, to ensure its successful implementation in the construction industry. A case study is given to illustrate the use of ICT in supporting value management studies. The key issues surrounding the emerging field of research - collaborative construction information management - and the potential benefits and challenges of its wide adoption are discussed at depth.

This paper describes the use of a highly interactive and inter-operative application for complex simulation environments, or Synthetic Environments (SE), as deployed for construction as Construction Synthetic Environments (CSE). Based on the High Level Architecture (HLA), this research focuses on implementing simulation technology in a software environment, COSYE, that will be the foundation for building CSE applications. This framework is discussed in the context of tunneling and industrial construction applications, including steel fabrication and pipe-spool manufacture. The framework is demonstrated using the NEST sanitary tunnel project in Edmonton, Canada, in which COSYE was used for scenario-based analysis and planning.

Natural disasters, such as the recent floods in the Midwest, Hurricane Ike in the Gulf coast region (U.S.), and the earthquake in Sichuan (China), cause severe damage to the infrastructure as well as the associated industries and communities that rely on the infrastructure. The estimated damages due to Hurricane Ike in 2008 were a staggering $27 billion, the third worst in U.S. history. In addition, the worst earthquake in three decades in Sichuan resulted in about 90,000 people dead or missing and $20 billion of the estimated loss. A common observation in the analyses of these natural disaster events is the inadequacy of critical infrastructure to withstand the forces of natural calamities and the lack of mitigation strategies when they occur on the part of emergency-related organizations, industries, and communities. If the emergency-related agencies could identify and fortify the vulnerable critical infrastructure in the preparedness stage, the damage and impacts can be significantly reduced. Therefore, it is important to develop a decision support system (DSS) for identifying region-specific mitigation strategies based on the inter-relationships between the infrastructure and associated industries and communities in the affected region. To establish effective mitigation strategies, relevant data were collected from the affected areas with respect to the technical, social, and economic impact levels. The data analysis facilitated identifying the major factors, such as vulnerability, criticality, and severity, for developing a DSS. Customized mitigation strategies that will help agencies prepare, respond, and recover according to the disaster response were suggested.

Construction contracts involve the allocation or distribution of the risks inherent to a construction project between or among contracting parties. However, it has been a common practice that only one party drafts the contract due to practical reasons and particular policies of various organizations. Interviews were conducted on some local contractors to gain their meaningful insights and standpoints on the allocation of each risk. These results were compared with the actual risk allocation using the Philippine government standard contract and risk principles from the literature to determine if their considered opinions provide a plausible alternative. A sample application of this evaluation is presented for construction-related risks and risk allocation recommendations are provided in the end.

The demand for super tall building construction is increasing worldwide. There has been a constant request for achieving early payback on investment by shortening the construction time. This pertains especially for the case of huge investment projects such as super tall building construction. It is very important to shorten the construction time for the building framework, which requires substantial construction time and cost, and this is directly related to the establishment of an optimum lift plan for construction. When there is a problem in the selection of the lift equipment, it is almost impossible to revise the selection, resulting in a possible failure of the project. Thus, the purpose of this study is to analyze the function and logic for the development of the process for the selection of lift equipment for super tall building projects and further development of making the analyzed process into a system. In line with this research objective, the process of selecting the optimum lift equipment by domestic construction company was investigated and analyzed as well as collecting the actual field data. The actual data were obtained by sensors installed on tower cranes at three construction sites with the help from the construction company.

This paper offers a competitor analysis model for use by contractors as parts of more informed approach in identifying key competitors, and as a basis for formulating bidding strategies. Linear mixed model approach is used in measuring competitiveness between bids (by using bid competitiveness percentage) according to: (i) project size, (ii) work sector; (iii) work nature; and (iv) number of bidders. The model was tested empirically by application to a bidding dataset obtained from a large Hong Kong contractor. Allowing for heterogeneity across competing contractors (i.e. with the model parameters that varied across contractors), the results indicate that competitiveness in bidding of this contractor is generally greater than the majority of his competitors.

Shihmen reservoir was started in May 1963. The main purposes of Shihmen reservoir are for agriculture, power supply, flood control and tourism. Shihme Asn dam is an earth dam. Its crown height is 133m above mean sea level, with length 360 m, watershed 763.4 km², and maximum volume 309 million cms. Turbidity in Shihmen dam was severely affected by typhoons Aere (2004) and Masa (2005). Increased deposition after Aere was 28 million cms. Turbidity at Shihmen Canal Inlet is 3000 NTU (Nephelometry Turbidity Unit). Sediment sluicing strategies for downstream channel are demanded. Therefore, diversionary sediment preventing channel is planned in the upstream of Shihmen reservoir. Finally, turbid flow in tunnel channel is bypassed and diverted its flow down to downstream.

Knowledge management (KM) is one of the useful management tools in today's project management (PM) practice, such as construction projects. Nobody can deny the importance of "useful knowledge" always helps organizations and project managers shaping a decision. Due to the trend of globalization, it is now very common that an organization may comprise employees from different countries of distinct national-cultures working together. It is also not uncommon that different projects, within an organization, may have their own organizational-cultures which influence its knowledge repository, transfer process and knowledge strategy. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to align all these cultures and consolidate them to benefit the KM process and PM practice. Organizations and project managers understand that different national-cultural and organizational-cultural factors will create impact on the philosophy of KM process which will subsequently affect PM practice. Those factors may affect interpersonal relations and exchange of knowledge between projects and amongst staff. Systematic KM process can utilize the goodness of different employees from distinct cultures which can eventually drive the organization and projects to success. The purpose of this paper, based upon a case study of a Hong Kong construction company, is to discuss how those cultural factors are linked to KM and what organization and project managers can do to improve the KM process and PM practice.

In 2008 the total estimated failure costs in the Netherlands was estimated to be 11.4% of the industry's turnover compared to 7.7% seven years earlier. Failure costs can be the consequence of rework as a result of failure to conform to the product requirements and specifications or due to inefficient processes and bad management practices. Many construction companies however are unaware of the exact nature of these costs, their root causes or how to control them. This paper describes work carried out in the Netherlands to identify the different types of failure costs in construction and their root causes. The research described builds on previous findings by another research institution and expands it to include information collected from project cases and a survey of a number of project managers in the construction industry. The paper describes the analysis of the results from cases and the survey to identify the root causes of failure costs. Research shows, for example, that many failure costs are related to the client taking late decisions and making changes to the project requirements.

With the growth of information and communication technologies adoption in construction projects, it could be anticipated that more property owners and construction firms will attempt to use electronic gears and gadgets for site monitoring or surveillance purposes. As the construction workers may be the major group of project team members being monitored, from managerial perspectives and for ethical reasons, it is essential to investigate their degree of acceptance on site monitoring systems. Indeed studies on office workplace monitoring suggest that a monitoring system could shape or control the behaviors of employees. With adequate refinements, their research models could be applicable in the construction industry. This paper presents a model for analyzing the antecedences that affect workers' acceptance level on electronic monitoring, and investigating if there is any behavioral change.

Study from Yogyakarta earthquake reconstruction program, cast-in-place wall using fix-size formwork system (Old-CIP) has offered a good alternative for house construction. A simulation has also confirmed that this system using mortar as the main material can provide cheapest cost and lowest total man power compared to conventional wall construction technique: brick or mortar-block wall. This paper presents the new wall construction technique: full size cast-in-place wall (New-CIP). The detail of how this new technique implemented is described. In addition, considering that material and labor cost in one area is different to others, cost analysis for different resources prices and wages of three cities are taken into a simulation. The analysis is aimed to distinguish the implementation feasibility of New-CIP system compared to the four common wall systems. Finally, its implementation resistance is also discussed.

Korean public owners who order public multi-family housing construction projects have yet to gain access to a model for predicting construction cost. For this reason, their construction cost prediction is mainly dependent upon historic data and experience. In this paper, a cost-prediction model based on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) in the design phase of public multi-family housing construction projects was developed. The developed model can determine the total construction cost by estimating the different Building, Civil, Mechanical, Electronic and Telecommunication, and Landscaping work costs. Model validation showed an accuracy of 97.56%, confirming the model's excellent viability. The developed model can thus be used to predict the construction cost to be shouldered by public owners before the design is completed. Moreover, any change orders during the design phase can be immediately applied to the model, and various construction costs by design alternative can be verified using this model. Therefore, it is expected that public owners can exercise effective design management by using the developed cost prediction model. The use of such an effective cost prediction model can enable the owners to accurately determine in advance the construction cost and prevent increase or decrease in cost arising from the design changes in the design phase, such as change order. The model can also prevent the untoward increase in the duration of the design phase as it can effectively control unnecessary change orders.

Strategic alliance is a proactive management process that integrates and optimizes value-added services of each party to best achieve business objectives of all parties within the relationship. Under the current competitive global environment, strategic alliance can produce a "Win-Win" situation and thus change paradigm that has resided in the construction industry. While many studies revealed the significance of alliance relationship in the industry, its impact on project performance has rarely been analyzed. Using the data obtained from 661 construction projects in the Construction Industry Institute database (359 projects from 38 owners and 302 projects from 29 contractors), this study first diagnoses the implementation status of strategic alliance at both project and company levels. Then, its impact on project performance is quantified and discussed. The descriptive analysis performed in this study revealed that an average of 79% of owner companies and 69% of contractor companies have ever implemented strategic alliance into at least one of their projects. However, both owner and contractor companies did not always use the strategy for all or their projects. Only 33% and 30% of projects reported by owners and contractors have been completed under alliance relationship, respectively. Analyzing the alliance impact on project performance, this study also establishes that strategic alliance positively affects project performance of both owners and contractors while owners should consider and control the level of its use for their projects. Recognizing and understanding the benefits from strategic alliance will be a starting point to produce mutual success among project participants, ultimately allowing the construction industry to go forward to a sustainable industry that transfers success from one project to the other.

During the process of excavation for substructures of buildings, precise and constant measurements of retaining wall displacement is crucial for construction to be complete and safe. Currently an inclinometer is used to measure displacement around the perimeter of an excavation site. The existing inclinometer system requires an instrument to be placed inside pre-bored holes for each measurement with an typical interval of two weeks. This makes it difficult to obtain continuous displacement data, especially during a critical time such as rainy season in summer. Also, the existing inclinometer is placed at certain distance away from the retaining wall system itself. Thus, exact measurement of retaining wall movement is compromised because of the distance between the retaining wall and the inclinometer. This paper presents the development of wireless inclinometer system for the displacement measurement of retaining walls by being attached directly to the retaining wall. The result of the application of the developed systems are provided with advanced ubiquitous sensor network (USN) system features. The USN technique incorporated into the system enables users to monitor movement data from wherever possible and convenient such as construction manager's office on site or any other places connected through internet. The research work presented in this paper will provide a basis to save construction time and cost by preventing safe-related unexpected delay of construction due to the failure or collapse of retaining walls.

Digital image recognition has been used for steel bridge surface assessment since late 1990s. However, the non-uniform illumination problems such as shades, shadows, and highlights are still challenges in image processing to date. Therefore, this paper develops a new approach to tackle the non-uniform illumination problem for rust image adjustment. The inhomogeneous illumination problem is divided into shades/shadows and highlights in this paper. The proposed BEMD-morphology approach (BMA) utilizes the bidimensional empirical mode decomposition to mitigate the shade/shadow effect, and the morphological processing to detect and replace the highlight area. Finally, the rust image processed with the BMA will be segmented by the K-Means algorithm, one of the most popular and effective methods, to show the effectiveness of illumination adjustment.

Double-front construction machinery, which was designed for complicated tasks, requires intelligent systems that can provide the quantitative work analysis needed to determine effective work procedures and that can provide operational and cognitive support for operators. Construction work environments are extremely complicated, however, and this makes state identification difficult. We therefore defined primitive static states (PSS) that are determined using on-off data for the lever inputs and manipulator loads for each part of the grapple and front and that are completely independent of the various environmental conditions and operator skill levels. To confirm the usefulness of PSS, we performed experiments with a demolition task by using our virtual reality simulator. We confirmed that PSS could robustly and accurately identify the work states and that untrained skills could be easily inferred from the PSS-based work analysis. We also confirmed in skill-training experiments that advice information using PSS-based skill analysis greatly improved work performance. We thus confirmed that PSS can adequately identify work states and are useful for work analysis and skill improvement.

Automation and robotic technology (ART) has been successfully applied in the manufacturing and allied industries to achieve on-time delivery of quality products at increasingly reduced costs. Meeting time, quality and cost targets still remains a big challenge in the global construction industry with prevalence of time and cost overruns. Application of ART in the construction industry could contribute to significant improvement in the efficient and effective delivery of projects to meet and exceed client expectations. However, the uptake of ART is still low in the construction industry. This study investigates the various ways in which ART could be applied to improve construction project delivery, potential areas of applications, and constraints to the uptake of the technology in the construction industry. Recommendations are made for improving the uptake of ART in the construction industry.

High-rise construction sites, especially those situated in spatially constrained urban areas, have difficulties in timely delivery of materials. Modern techniques such as Just-in-time delivery, and use of information technology such as Project Management Information System (PMIS), are targeted to improve the efficiency of the logistics. Such IT-driven management techniques can be further benefited from state-of-the-art devices such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN), which has resulted in notable achievements in automated logistics management at the construction sites. Based on those achievements, this research develops USN hardware toolkits for construction lifts, which aims to be automated the vertical material delivery by sensing the material information and routing it automatically to the right place. The gathered information from the sensors can also be used for monitoring the overall status. The developed system will be tested in the actual high-rise construction sites to assess the system's feasibility. The proposed system is being implemented using Zigbee communication modules and RFID sensor networks which will communicate with the intelligent palette system (previously developed by the authors). To support the system, a lift-mountable intelligent toolkit is under development. Its feasibility test will be conducted by applying the implemented system to a test bed and then analyzing efficiency of the system and the toolkit. The collected test data will be provided as a basis of autonomous vertical transport equipment development. From this research, efficient management of the material lift is expected with increased accuracy, as well as better management of overall construction schedule benefited from the system. Further research will be expected to develop a smart construction lift, which will eliminate the need for human supervision, thus enabling a real 'autonomous' operation of the system.

This paper presents a robotic tower-crane system using encoder and gyroscope sensors as path tracking devices. Tower crane work is often associated with falling accidents and industrial disasters. Such problems often incur a loss of time and money for the contractor. For this reason, many studies have been done on an automatic tower crane. As a part of 5-year 23-million-dollar research project in Korea, we are developing a robotic tower crane which aims to improve the safety level and productivity. We selected a luffing tower crane, which is commonly used in urban construction projects today, as a platform for the robotic tower crane system. This system comprises two modules: the automated path planning module and the path tracking module. The automated path planning system uses the 3D Cartesian coordinates. When the robotic tower crane lifts construction material, the algorithm creates a line, which represents a lifting path, in virtual space. This algorithm seeks and generates the best route to lift construction material while avoiding known obstacles from real construction site. The path tracking system detects the location of a lifted material in terms of the 3D coordinate values using various types of sensors including adopts encoder and gyroscope sensors. We are testing various sensors as a candidate for the path tracking device. This specific study focuses on how to employ encoder and gyroscope sensors in the robotic crane These sensors measure a movement and rotary motion of the robotic tower crane. Finally, the movement of the robotic tower crane is displayed in a virtual space that synthesizes the data from two modules: the automatically planned path and the tracked paths. We are currently field-testing the feasibility of the proposed system using an actual tower crane. In the next step, the robotic tower crane will be applied to actual construction sites with a following analysis of the crane's productivity in order to ascertain its economic efficiency.

Image processing has been utilized for assessment of infrastructure surface coating conditions for years. However, there is no robust method to overcome the non-uniform illumination problem to date. Therefore, this paper aims to deal with non-uniform illumination problems for bridge coating assessment and to achieve automated rust intensity recognition. This paper starts with selection of the best color configuration for non-uniformly illuminated rust image segmentation. The adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is adopted as the framework to develop the new model, the box-and-ellipse-based neuro-fuzzy approach (BENFA). Finally, the performance of BENFA is compared to the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) method, which is often used in image recognition, to show the advantage and robustness of BENFA.

This study reveals the status, perceptions, and future directions associated with green building within construction-related companies. A survey research method was used to capture current experience levels and capabilities of companies with regard to green construction. Expectations and perceptions about the future of the construction industry with regard to green building were obtained from construction-related companies recruiting from the Myers-Lawson School of Construction at Virginia Tech from 2006 and 2008. The findings of this study support the growing importance of green building as a component of the whole construction market and provide a benchmark against which to measure future changes in the industry over time.

Carbon finance is the investment in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission reduction projects in developing countries and countries with economies in transition within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) or Joint Implementation (JI) and with creation of financial instruments, i.e., carbon credits, which are tradable in carbon market. The additional revenue generated from carbon credits will increase the bankability of projects by reducing the risks of commercial lending or grant finance. Meantime, it has also demonstrated numerous opportunities for collaborating across sectors, and has served as a catalyst in bringing climate issues to bear in projects relating to rural electrification, renewable energy, energy efficiency, urban infrastructure, waste management, pollution abatement, forestry, and water resource management. Establishing additionality is essential for successful CDM project development. One of the key steps is the investment analysis. As guided by UNFCCC, financial indicators such as IRR, NPV, DSCR etc are most commonly used in both Option II & Option III. However, economic indicator such as Economic Internal Rate of Return(EIRR) are often overlooked in Option III even it might be more suitable for the project. This could be due to the difficulties in economic analysis. Although Asian Development Bank(ADB) has given guidelines in evaluating EIRR, there are still large amount of works have to be carried out in estimating the economic, financial, social and environmental benefits in the host country. This paper will present a case study of a CDM development of a 18 MW hydro power plant with carbon finance option in central Vietnam. The estimation of respective factors in EIRR, such as Willingness to Pay(WTP), shadow price etc, will be addressed with the adjustment to Vietnam local provincial factors. The significance of carbon finance to Vietnam renewable energy development will also be addressed.

As an on-going research project, Zero Net Energy Test Home (ZNETH) project investigates effective approaches to achieve whole-house environmental and energy goals. The main research objectives are (1) to identify energy saving solutions for designs, materials, and construction methods for the ZNETH house and (2) to verify whether ZNETH house can produce more energy than the house uses by utilizing Building Information Modeling (BIM) and energy analysis tools. The initial project analysis is conducted using building information modeling (BIM) and energy analysis tools. The BIM-driven research approach incorporates architectural and construction engineering methods for improving whole-building performance while minimizing increases in overall building cost. This paper discusses about advantages/disadvantages of using BIM integrated energy analysis, related interoperability issues between BIM software and energy analysis software, and results of energy analysis for ZNETH. Although this investigation is in its early stage, several dramatic outcomes have already been observed. Utilizing BIM for energy analysis is an obvious benefit because of the ease by which the 3D model is transferred, and the speed that an energy model can be analyzed and interpreted to improve design. The research will continue to use the ZNETH project as a testing bed for the integration of sustainable design into the BIM process.

Water is a strategic resource for Singapore due to its small land mass and more than half of the mainland serves as catchment for raw water, including construction sites. Construction site typically involves earthworks and in conjunction with the frequent and intense rainstorm in Singapore, produce runoff of high turbidity due to suspended sediments. The resulting high concentration of suspended sediment in construction site runoff very often leads to aesthetically unpleasant reservoirs and potentially increases the treatment cost of raw water. To mitigate this, the local standard requires the discharged concentration of total suspended solids of construction runoff leaving a construction site to be less than 50mg/l which is a very high standard. This paper will present, examine and discuss particular issues and practices of Singapore's construction industry in meeting this requirement. The focus will be on two areas: Government lead initiatives and industry practices. How the government agencies worked together with the industry professionals to develop a system to ensure meeting of the standard is discussed. In addition, the types of industry practices, including various Best Management Practice to reduce erosion in construction sites and implement effective sedimentation on construction sites are examined.

The employment of risk management theory in Urban Disaster Management System (UDMS) has become an important trend in recent years. The viewpoint of risk management is mainly a comprehensive risk assessment of various internal and external factors, and a subsequent handling of risks. Through continuous and systematic accumulation and analysis of risk information, disaster prevention and rescue system is established. Taking risk management theory as the foundation, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed a series of UDMS in the mega-cities all over the world. With this system as a common platform, OECD cooperates with different cities to develop disaster prevention and rescue system consisting of vulnerability assessment methods, risk assessment and countermeasures. The paper refers to the urban disaster vulnerability assessment and risk management of OECD and the mega-cities of different advanced and developed countries in the world, and then constructs a preliminarily drafted structure for the vulnerability assessment methods and risk management mechanism in the metropolitan districts of Taiwan.

The effectiveness of Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools and processes has been recognized by the industry and owners are beginning to adopt Triple Bottom Line accounting practices, to enhance economic performance and environmental and social performance. However, the widespread and practical application of Green BIM remains largely unrealized. The authors identify that lack of understanding of the applicability of sustainability metrics to BIM design process is a significant barrier to this adoption. Through literature review this paper outlines the various sustainability metrics available to construction and elaborates on the potential of BIM for sustainable design. The paper maps and correlates applicable concepts of sustainability evaluation systems to BIM and describes the constraints in current BIM tools.

Large hospitals such as medical centers provide not only medical services, but also carry the responsibilities for emergency refuges, medical researches and education. The function of large hospitals is as important as other infrastructure systems such as highways, bridges, and utilities. When disasters occur, the hospitals have to provide emergency medical services for victims and support the patient's needs of health. In order to keep a smooth operation of hospitals, the maintenance management of hospital buildings should be carefully investigated. However, there are few researches focused on maintenance management issues of hospital buildings. This paper investigated the National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) and established a maintenance cost database. The NTUH is the best-known and most high-renowned medical center in Taiwan in which more than 4,000 employees serving approximately 2,000 in-patients and 7,000 out-patients daily. The data were collected from the NTUH which consisted of 16,228 maintenance records in the past ten years. This paper analyzed these data to obtain various characteristics of maintenance records, and revealed the key items of maintenance cost for large hospital buildings, which can provide the facility manager of hospital buildings to execute a proper maintenance policy for hospital buildings.

The more repetitive, complex and objective the work, the more effective automation is. Code checking is an example of this. Checking building codes through a thick set of drawings is error-prone and time-consuming. In order to overcome this problem, several organizations have initiated efforts to automate building-code checking. Initiated study mainly focused on checking codes for invalidation, required size and crash, and then area of checkable codes have been expanding. But, it has not been considered for codes regarding anti-disaster/egress, which is also issued these days. This study is about how to automatically check codes for anti-disaster and egress based on Korea building codes. The codes can be categorized as five sections: egress way, material/capability, principals of evacuation, evacuation stairway and fire protection partition. To check automatically, there are problems, such as expression of codes for egress and limitation of extractable information from the BIM model. This paper shows what problems exist and assignments to be resolved. Also, current developing processes are presented, and suggestions are made about the direction for the work that remains.

This paper presents the selection, examination, and user test (SEUT) procedure to determine the ideal color scheme for a 4D model. This systematic procedure can be performed iteratively to obtain the color scheme that would be most appropriate for construction purposes. To verify the proposed procedure, an example case with two iterations is presented. Ten color schemes were examined and 48 users tested during the two iterations, and the result shows that the SEUT procedure is an effective method for determining the ideal color scheme for 4D models.

This paper summarizes some of approaches that could be taken for data exchange in a non-interoperable work environment and reports lessons learned from the Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Park project. Today's widespread application of building information modeling (BIM) to the construction and architectural design industries requires a change in the cooperation between business organizations and their methods of communication. In particular, the interoperability of information between interdisciplinary organizations, which use specific programs for different purposes, has become a critical issue. More than just a technical problem, it is also highly related to an organization's collaboration culture and the particulars of a specific project. This paper describes the interoperability issue that occurred during the construction documentation phase of the irregularly shaped building project, Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Park, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and Samoo Architects and Engineers, from the perspective of the technological problem and the collaborative organizations' communications. Although the perfect compatibility of information is not possible, this paper deals with a practical approach to the interoperability issue by examining the way the end-users of computer-aided design (CAD) resolved the interoperability problems in practice.

Organizational learning of construction team has been long addressed in the literatures, but the mechanism of learning and the influence of leader in the team still remain vague. This paper presents a computational model (OLT) depicting the mechanism and the influence of leader in a systemic way. The OLT model is a multi-agent system based on some eloquent propositions proposed in previous researches. The proposed model is preliminarily validated by some toy-problem simulations. In the OLT model, the leader is assigned as a project manager. The results show that a proper leader can effectively improve the learning process and the result-in performance, in which the team learning is mainly affected by both the leader and the majority in a team. Based on our findings, two propositions are concluded accordingly: (1) Learning of a team would be enhanced if a proper leader is assigned; (2) The effectiveness of learning would increase in a team, in which the members retain explorative attitudes.

The success and failure of any project depends upon many factors, the Project Manager is considered to be the key contributor to the success of any project, as well as a guide to the team members to achieve the client satisfaction (Cost, Time and Quality). Therefore the main aim of this paper is to provide a practical approach for understanding the importance of the Project Manager and his effectiveness to the success of the construction projects. In addition, the Project Manager's roles, responsibilities and duties have direct impact to the success of the construction projects. In order to identify the thoughts and opinion of the construction industry on this particular assertion, a quantitative study was carried out within the UK construction industry. The result of the study shows that there is an extremely strong correlation between the Project Manager and the success of the construction projects. In construction projects the Project Manager is considered to be one of the most important people who can lead and drive the projects in the right direction and conclude construction projects successfully. Moreover, these can play the most important role regarding the improvement of the organization's performance, the organization's profitability and the client's satisfaction. The research confirmed that the Project Manager is a very essential element to the success of the construction project and have an impact at every stage of the construction project. So it concluded that selection of a Project Manager should be carefully done with regard to experience, knowledge, power/authority and good understanding to the kind of the project.

The demands for large-scale construction projects such as Mega-projects are largely increasing due to the rapid growth of increasing populations as well as the need to replace existing buildings and infrastructure. Increasing costs of materials, supplies, and labors require the first cost estimates at the preliminary planning stage to be as accurate as possible. This paper presents the results obtained from the survey on evaluating nine critical success factors that influence the accurate first cost estimates for large-scale projects from practical experiences. It then examines the current cost structures of construction companies for large-scale projects, followed by the causes for cost and schedule overrun. Twenty completed surveys were collected and the Analytic Hierarchy Process was applied to analyze the data. The results indicate that technology issues, the contract type, and social and environmental impacts are the significant leading factors for accurate first cost estimates of large-scale construction projects.

In the Urban Regeneration Project, the scale becomes huge and the composition of participating organizations is complex. It is necessary to establish the master plan fast and effectively harmonize conflict options and interests in the early stage of the project. However, the master planner, who is tasked to establish the master plan, and the master planning team, are difficult to establish the master plan fast while effectively considering various and complex information related to regeneration. The Urban Regeneration Project is composed of various types of computer files like HWP, EXL, PDF, DWG and others. When the master plan is established, it is necessary to link the information items and physical files of urban generation in order to effectively save the files in storage for easy search and utilization. This study developed a prototype system to support participating subjects of the Urban Regeneration Projects. It will effectively utilize the information items in the physical computer files using information blocks and Metadata. The developed system provides the base to effectively manage large amount of documents in the early stage of the Urban Regeneration Project and make effective decision-making using the concept of data warehouse.

Project-based joint ventures are often used in the construction industry to assemble an organization that meets a client's project needs and matches or exceeds the capacities of competitors. The joint venture / partnerships provides the means for a firm to quickly add resource, political, technical, or other required strengths that will increase project acquisition. This paper sets out to study the types of joint ventures, different issues or problems while having joint ventures and the critical factors that contribute to successful joint ventures. A questionnaire was designed and administered to survey the issues and present practices of joint ventures in the South Florida construction industry. Along with the questionnaire, personnel interviews were also conducted to get first hand knowledge about the subject matter. The results are presented in the paper. These results specifically identify the overall practice of joint ventures in South Florida as well as indicate the most significant factors leading to failure or success of these ventures.

Gas & Oil plant construction projects are increasing recently all over oil-producing countries. An EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) company, which participates in the plant projects, should possess pertinent engineering licenses and EPC management skills to create high added-value. Nonetheless, there exist various risks involved in the EPC life cycle process due to such characteristics of construction projects as long duration of construction time and complicated processes along with the procured goods or services subjected to various logistics. The objective of this paper is to analyze the overall EPC life cycle for proper process and to examine various information and document. Additionally, the principal data for the analysis of the EPC process are derived from personal interviews with experts and specialty contractors of the plant projects. The results of this study would be widely used as a guide for efficient and effective management of overseas gas plant projects.

In the past, many state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the U.S. managed their highway assets on a "worst first" basis and planned their highway projects in a tactical rather than strategic fashion. Due to increasingly tight highway budgets and recognition of long term benefits of asset management systems, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has strongly pushed and encouraged state DOTs to implement asset management for managing their highway assets and highway projects. Currently, many DOTs have actively implemented and are in the process of applying this asset management concept for their highway infrastructure. However, different DOTs are developing different asset management systems because of their different organizational structures, data management structures, relationship with the legislature, and investment priorities. This study first identifies asset management indicators which are essential to successfully implementing asset management systems for State highway assets. The research team conducted a survey of asset management experts and reviewed the practices and policies of leading DOTs in asset management. Based on these indicators, this study develops an Asset Management Assessment Model (AM²) for different asset management systems. This model can be used by different DOTs to evaluate their current asset management systems and identify their strong areas and also their weak areas to improve in order to fully benefit from the advanced concept of asset management.

Operation of LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) plants requires an effective maintenance strategy. To this end, the long-term and short-term trend of faults, such as mechanical and electrical troubles, should be identified so as to take proactive approach for ensuring the smooth and productive operation. However, it is not an easy task to predict the fault trend in LNG plants. Many variables and unexpected conditions make it quite difficult for the facility manager to be well prepared for future faulty conditions. This paper presents a model to predict the fault trend in a LNG plant. ARIMA (Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average) model is combined with Wavelet Transform to enhance the prediction capability of the proposed model. Test results show the potential of the proposed model for the preventive maintenance strategy.

This paper introduces an automated tool named Advanced Stochastic Schedule Simulation System (AS4). The system automatically integrates CPM schedule data exported from Primavera Project Planner (P3) and historical activity duration data obtained from a project data warehouse, computes the best fit probability distribution functions (PDFs) of historical activity durations, assigns the PDFs identified to respective activities, computes the optimum number of simulation runs, simulates the schedule network for the optimum number of simulation runs, and estimates the best fit PDF of project completion times (PCTs). AS4 improves the reliability of simulation-based scheduling by effectively dealing with the uncertainties of the activities' durations, increases the usability of the schedule data obtained from commercial CPM software, and effectively handles the variability of the PCTs by finding the best fit PDF of PCTs. It is designed as an easy-to-use computer tool programmed in MATLAB. AS4 encourages the use of simulation-based scheduling because it is simple to use, it simplifies the tedious and burdensome process involved in finding the PDFs of the many activities' durations and in assigning the PDFs to the many activities of a new network under modeling, and it does away with the normality assumptions used by most simulation-based scheduling systems in modeling PCTs.

Simulation applications for analyzing the productivity of construction operations at operation level and project schedules at project level are crucial methods in project management. The application at two different levels should be very tightly linked to each other in practice. However, appropriate integration at the levels is not achieved in that existing systems do not support to integrate operation models into a schedule model. This paper presents a new approach named to Discrete Event Simulation-Nesting modeling approach, which supports not only productivity analysis at operation level but also schedule management at a project level. The system developed by the authors allows creating operation models at the operation level, maintaining them in operation model library, executing sensitivity analysis to find the behaviors of the operation models when different combination of resources are used as existing DES systems do. On top of the conventional functions, the new system facilitates to find the optimum solution of resource combinations which satisfy the user's interest by computing the hourly productivity and the hourly cost of the operation. By drag-and-dropping an operation model kept in the operation model library, the operation models are integrated into an activity of the schedule model. When a complete schedule model is established by nesting operation models into the schedule model, stochastic simulation based scheduling is executed. A case study is presented to demonstrate the new simulation system and verify the validity of the system.

This paper presents a tool called Quality-Cost optimization system (QCOS), which integrates Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) and Quality Function Deployment (QFD), for tradeoff between quality and cost of the unitized metal curtain-wall unit. A construction owner as the external customer pursues to maximize the quality of the curtain-wall unit. However, the contractor as the internal customer pursues to minimize the cost involved in designing, manufacturing and installing the curtain-wall unit. It is crucial for project manager to find the tradeoff point which satisfies the conflicting interests pursued by the both parties. The system would be beneficial to establish a quality plan satisfying the both parties. Survey questionnaires were administered to the construction owner who has an experience of curtain-wall project, the architects who are the independent assessor, and the contractors who were involved in curtain-wall design and installation. The Customer Requirements (CRs) and their importance weights, the relationship between CRs and Technical Attributes (TAs) consisting of a curtain-wall unit, and the cost ratios of each components consisting curtain-wall unit are obtained from the three groups mentioned previously. The data obtained from the surveys were used as the QFD input to compute the Owner Satisfaction (OS) and Contractor Satisfaction (CS). MOGA is applied to optimize resource allocation under limited budget when multi-objectives, OS and CS, are pursued at the same time. The deterministic multi-objective optimization method using MOGA and QFD is extended to stochastic model to better deal with the uncertainties of QFD input and the variability of QFD output. A case study demonstrates the system and verifies the system conformance.

For a construction project to progress smoothly, effective cost estimation is vital, particularly in the conceptual and schematic design stages. In these early phases, despite the fact that initial estimates are highly sensitive to changes in project scope, owners require accurate forecasts which reflect their supplying information. Thus, cost estimators need effective estimation strategies. Practically, parametric cost estimates are the most commonly used method in these initial phases, which utilizes historical cost data (Karshenas 1984, Kirkham 2007). Hence, compilation of historical data regarding appropriate cost variance governing parameters is a prime requirement. However, precedent practice of data mining (data preprocessing) for denoising internal errors or abnormal values is needed before compilation. As an effort to deal with this issue, this research proposed a statistical methodology for data preprocessing and verified that data preprocessing has a positive impact on the enhancement of estimate accuracy and stability. Moreover, Statistically Preprocessed data Based Parametric (SPBP) cost models are developed based on multiple regression equations and verified their effectiveness compared with conventional cost models.

The construction industry has been a main pillar and serves as a regulator of the Hong Kong economy. Subsequently, the fluctuations in the level of construction output can induce significant rippling effects to the economy. The Asian Financial Crisis started in 1997 and the SARS outbreak in 2003 both introduced major challenges and impacts to the Hong Kong economy and consequently the construction sector. Such decline in the importance of construction has suggested a possible structural change in the sector. It is worth investigating the driving forces behind the construction demand and see if they have changed after the heavy impacts in the past decade. The above considerations have, therefore, been the motivation of the present study to model the Hong Kong residential construction demand through multiple regression technique which can identify the significant influencing factors to the residential demand. The residential construction is studied as it constitutes a significant portion of the total construction volume. The residential sector has great influence to the general economy of Hong Kong. It is found that the underlying market structure and the driving factors for Hong Kong residential demand before and after the Asian Economic Crisis and SARS outbreak are different, suggesting that the residential construction sector or even the larger construction industry may have undergone a major structural change as Hong Kong's economy approaches maturity. It is also observed that the past literatures on construction demand are mostly focusing on predicting demand under a stable economic environment. Hence, it is worth examining if it is possible to model during economic hardship when the residential sector fluctuate dramatically under different external impacts, such as the recent global financial tsunami.

This research project was carried out to develop the technique to assess quantitatively and rapidly the stability of a tunnel by using the measured displacement at the tunnel construction site under excavation. To achieve this purpose, a critical strain concept was introduced and applied to an assessment of a tunnel under construction. The new technique calculates numerically the strains of the surrounding ground by using the measured displacements during excavation. A numerical practical system was developed based on the proposed analysis technique in this study. The feasibility of the developed analysis module was verified by incorporating the analysis results obtained by commercial programs into the developed analysis module. To verify the feasibility of the developed analysis module, analysis results of models both elastic and elasto-plastic grounds were investigated for the circular tunnel design. Then the measured displacements obtained in the field are utilized practically to assess the safety of tunnels using critical strain concept. It was verified that stress conditions of in-situ ground and ground material properties were accurately assessed by inputting the calculated displacement obtained by commercial program into this module for the elastic ground. However for the elasto-plastic ground, analysis module can reproduce the initial conditions more closely for the soft rock ground than for the weathered soil ground. The stability of tunnels evaluated with two types of strains, that is, the strains obtained by dividing the crown displacement into a tunnel size and the strains obtained by using the analysis module. From this study, it is confirmed that the critical strain concept can be fully adopted within the engineering judgment in practical tunnel problems and the developed module can be used as a reasonable tool for the assessment of the tunnel stability in the field.

Concurrent construction (or overlapping) is an alternative project delivery process to reduce time-tomarket such that the owner can get higher profits; the increased profits due to shortened project duration would exceed the loss of profits from the increased cost, if any. For more effective concurrent construction, a new conceptual framework for concurrent construction planning is suggested. With multiple work methods available in each activity, the performance of overlapping between two activities in terms of cost is affected by the compatibility between work methods selected and the benefit to the project owner is determined by internal rate of return (RoR). The impact of the compatibility between work methods and the conceptual framework are explained by a hypothetical case study.

Image processing has been applied to steel bridge defect recognition since 1990s. Compare to human visual inspection, image processing provides a more objective and accurate way of assessment. Since shade and shadow may sometimes occur when taking bridge coating images, non-uniform illumination problems should be considered. By means of color image processing, this paper aims to mitigate the illumination effect for bridge coating assessment. Furthermore, the adaptable ellipse method (AEM) is proposed to recognize mild rust colors. Finally, AEM will be compared to the K-Means algorithm, a popular recognition method, to show its advantage.

The earthwork is essential procedure for all civil engineering projects. Because of its importance in terms of cost and time, it should be managed effectively. In light of this, The Intelligent Excavating System (IES) research consortium has established to improve the productivity, quality and safety of current excavating/earthwork system by the Ministry of Land, Transportation and Maritime Affairs (MLTM) of Korea. This paper summarizes ongoing research aimed at development knowledge and presents a framework of task planning and visualization system for IES. The task planning and visualization system consists of three functions. 1) Using digital terrain model which created by 3D laser scanner, the system can divide it and generates global/local work area so that the excavator can work through the area. 2) In order to operate and/or control the excavator, the system exports the location, paths of boom, arm and bucket data of the excavator to control center. 3) The task planning system is visualized on the computer programming aided-graphic interface which simulates the planned work processes and eventually assists the operator for the control of the excavator. The case study which we have performed, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed system.

Robot and application of IT skill of construction industry are slow comparatively than another thing industry by the feature. This research proposes progress management and real time information gathering through construction automation and RFID focused on steel structure construction. Building for RTPM system, must consider various variables and surrounding situation in construction field and it is the most important and difficult matter that draw right requirement and grasp relation between this requirements to accomplish one suitable task considering these environment. Therefore, in this study analyzes requirement and target for RTPM system based on scenario that is easy to draw requirement and apply this to use case model. Presented method suggests that represent relation between goals and way that refines goal systematically from requirement of RTPM system. And it could express for visualization through the Way that attaches nonfunctional elements of system with system internal goal.

The scopes of the supply chain management in construction projects has expanded from the field management focusing on field storage, transportation, and lifting to the whole supply chain from the materials to field. The expansion of the supply chain management can raise the possibilities of leaner production, which enables shortened lead time of the difficult-to-operate materials, and prevents the work interference or delay. However, the expanded management range requires more information and management than an existing management style currently used for factory production of iron frame, curtain wall, PC, etc. In addition, there are limitations that expand the existing management style into the new supply chain management in construction projects and therefore it is required to automate the existing management style in order to extend the management range. The objective of this study is to propose the process and equipment that can manage the supply chain of the materials which range from the factory production to the field storage based on RFID/USN techniques, introducing small-sized transportation equipment(intelligent pallet), the vehicle tool kit(intelligent trailer), and in-and-out management equipment(Gate Sensor) as a prototype to effectively develop the appliances for operating the proposed process, and present the application possibility of the appliances. The full paper will present then the test results that the proposed appliances for the supply chain management automatically transmit and receive the generated information between the appliances or the appliance and sever under various wireless network circumstances such as zigbee, wibro, Wi-Fi, and CDMA.

This paper presents an integrated real-time monitoring and control framework that facilitates decision making by enabling project managers to take corrective actions right after any deviation happens and mitigate the damage to the ongoing steel projects. The proposed framework employs the High Level Architecture (HLA) as its infrastructure. It is composed of several individual monitoring and control components called "Federates," which cooperate and interact with each other through the Real-time Infrastructure (RTI). Reusability, interoperability and extendibility of federates in the proposed project control system make this a unique system.

A large-scaled research project titled "Intelligent Excavating System (IES)" sponsored by Korean government has launched in 2006. An issue of real-time 3D terrain modeling has become a crucial point for successful implementation of IES due to many application limitations of state-of-the-art techniques developed in various high-technology fields. Many feasible technologies such as laser scanning, structured lighting and so on were widely reviewed by professionals and researchers for one year. Various efforts such as literature reviews, interviews, and indoor experiments make us select a structural light technique and stereo vision technique as appropriate techniques for accomplishment of real-time 3D terrain modeling. It, however, revealed that off-the-shelf products of structural light and stereo-vision technique had many technical problems which should be resolved for practical applications in IES. This study introduces diverse methods modifying off-the-shelf package of the structural light method, one of feasible techniques and eventually allowing this technique to be successfully utilized for achieving fundamental research goals. This study also presents many efforts to resolve practical difficulties of this technique considering basic characteristics of excavating operations and particular environment of construction sites. Findings showed in this study would be beneficial for other researchers to conduct new researches for application of vision techniques to construction fields by provision of detail issues about practical application and diverse practical methods as solutions overcoming these issues.

Recently, the number of complex construction projects, such as high-density development and long-span mega structure construction, has been increasing globally. Therefore, the construction duration has become an even more important factor for success. Nevertheless, in domestic residential construction projects, it usually takes more time than twice as much as North American cases. The long construction duration causes a number of problems, for example growth of financial costs, fall in productivity, and weakness of competitiveness. If the framework construction duration can be shortened to 3 ~ 4 days, then it is also expected to complete the finish work of building in shorter duration, be led to reduce the entire construction duration, and eventually to save a great deal of indirect costs. For shortening the construction duration, previous researches pointed out that the development of simplified plan design should precedes. But, in reality, lack of experience of new design and innovative techniques tends to be the obstacle to wide adoption of the simplified plan design in construction fields. In this paper, a simplified structural plan design is proposed, and the construction cost is quantitatively compared between when traditional construction technique is applied to the traditional plan and when the duration-shortening key technique is applied to the developed plan.

Along with the changing pattern that the construction project is getting complicated, large-scaled and up-to-dated, necessity of efficient management of manpower and resources of the construction site is being increased. In particular, considering that the construction site requires a lot of labor force and in terms of the construction cost, labor cost shares 30-40%, labor management has become a very important factor. In this study, in order to support a stable and successful construction project implementation and supplement the existing system being utilized at the current site, construction site access management automation system based on hand vascular pattern, a biometrics system, is intended to be developed. Relevant theory for the system development and the problem of existing RFID system were evaluated and based on this findings, a system design and DB composition chart were envisaged. In addition, by applying this developed system to a number of sites, its result was analyzed

The Construction Industry Institute (CII) developed the Project Definition Rating Index (PDRI), as a part of their Front End Planning best practices, which helps project managers assess and measure project scope definition risk elements. U.S. Green Building Council are seeing the benefits of sustainable building and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification by positively impacting life cycle costs, building marketability, and organizational productivity. However, there have been no efforts to integrate these two planning tools in construction industry. By applying a supplemental tool which combines the PDRI with the LEED rating system, construction industry can develop and implement a tailored instrument that leads to total project success in sustainability. The objective of this research is to assemble a new front end planning mechanism for green buildings by incorporating the current PDRI and LEED systems.

Urban land consolidation, which is to reform land parcels to remove fragmentation and produce ideal blocks, is an effective means for urban renewal. Successful urban land consolidation brings out great benefits to the city officials as well as general public, such as improved city image, increased land value, and more effective land use. However, urban land consolidation can be detrimental to environment, especially in the ecological aspects, while the execution of land consolidation has been focused solely on development for the sake of human benefits. To remove negative effects of urban land consolidation to the ecological system, this paper is intended to establish a set of criteria for evaluating ecological impacts of an urban land consolidation plan. Firstly, key ecological indicators are identified using a special group decision-making process called "habitual domain analysis" and then individual weighting of each indicator is recorded by analytical hierarchy process. An urban ecological evaluation model with 4 levels and 23 indicators is thus developed.

The current residential process adheres to a traditional method of construction involving wood framing on-site on poured concrete foundations which has been widely applied in North America. A conventional residential construction process can include seventeen distinct stages ranging from stake-out to pre-occupancy inspection. The current practice possesses short comings including high construction material wastes, long scheduling timelines, adverse weather conditions, poor quality, low efficiencies and negative environmental impacts from transportation and equipment use. Over CAN $5 billion dollars was spent in the construction sector during 2007 in Canada. Previous findings in CO₂ emissions during the construction process of a conventional dwelling emphasize more than 45 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. Hence, in Alberta alone during 2007, almost 50,000 residential units would release more than two million tonnes of CO₂. These numbers demonstrate the economical and environmental impact in building construction and its relationship with CO₂ emissions. The aim of this paper is to quantify the CO₂ emissions from the current residential construction process in order to establish the baseline for CO₂ emission reduction opportunities. The quantification collection methodology will be approached by identifying the seventeen various stages of construction and quantifying the contributions of CO₂ from specific activities and their impacts of work for each stage. The approach of separating these into separate stages for collection will allow for independent opportunities for analysis from various independent contractors from the entire scope of work. The use of BIM will be implemented to efficiently quantify CO₂ emissions. Based on the CO₂ quantification baseline, emission reduction opportunities such as an industrialized construction process will be introduced that allows homebuilders to reduce the environmental and economical impact of home construction while enabling them to produce higher quality, more energy efficient homes in a safer and shorter period of time.

Noting the changes within the Singapore construction industry, fuelled by the government's 'green' initiatives in tandem with the prolonged effect of the 1997-2005 recession, this paper investigates Singapore contractors' attitudes towards environmental sustainability. Data were collected from 34 interviews with senior management of large and medium-sized general building contractors and the firms' archival records. The results show that the majority of the contractors embrace positive attitudes towards environmental sustainability. The respective contractors explicitly express their environmental drives by incorporating keywords such as 'quality', 'sustainability' and 'environmental and social benefits' into their firms' mission statements. The results also show that three environmental-related measures implemented by all contractors are: (i) stricter housekeeping procedures in construction sites; (ii) stricter wastage rates for construction materials; and (iii) greater focus on Just-In-Time delivery to minimise materials deterioration due to inappropriate site storage.

Alongside the increasingly larger domestic construction projects is the gradual rise in construction waste. Consequently, serious environmental problems emerge. The increase in demand for housing remodeling due mainly to the increase in national income and improvement of quality of life is the main reason for the increase in construction waste. This study was conducted as the basic study for the prevention and reduction of construction waste generated by apartment remodeling; it aimed at identifying the remodeling items and reasons. Toward this end, this study targeted apartments at least 15 years old and conducted a questionnaire survey to determine the remodeled sections and remodeling reasons. As a result of the questionnaire survey, the bathroom, floor finishing, and kitchen furniture recorded the highest ratios in remodeling. Old materials, aesthetic motivation, and pleasant living space composition were cited as the major remodeling reasons. This study is significant as a basic study for generating environmental and economic profits through systematic waste management. Further studies should develop guidelines suitable for construction waste reduction and recycling in line with the construction and demolition phases in case of remodeling.

The concepts of 'sustainable development', 'sustainable construction' and 'green building' have been elevated to priority levels in all types and phases of construction project development worldwide. Consultants and contractors are now required to seriously consider the impact of their operations on the natural environment and the society, and consequently adopt sustainable construction practices in the development process to minimize and mitigate the negative impacts of their activities. However, existing sustainability rating tools apply to the design, post-construction and operation phases of a building; no tool exists for the rating of the performance of the contractor or the project team at the construction phase. This study aimed to develop a model for evaluating the sustainability of construction operations, drawing on the global best practice standards on sustainability. Practical applications of the model were carried out through case studies to evaluate the performances of fifteen construction firms in New Zealand. The developed model and the outcomes of the case studies were presented, including potential areas of weaknesses, strengths, constraints to achievement or adoption of sustainable construction practices and areas for improvement in the operations of the firms. The successful application of the developed model in practice shows its usefulness and ease of application. It is therefore recommended for adoption as a simple but effective system for measuring and reporting on sustainability performance or sustainability of construction operations of firms in New Zealand and elsewhere.

In recent years, the demand for green buildings is growing fast due to legislative and social pressures. Construction organizations, which play an important role in promoting building industry growth, are facing with challenges on how to adapt themselves to enhance sustainability of the buildings. In this paper, the green value chain and system frameworks, an extend application of Porter's value chain and system models, are introduced. Based on deep analysis of the green value chain and system frameworks, a revolution model for construction organizations towards green building is created. Management factors critical for a successful green building project, at the firm and project organization level, are extracted. Furthermore, external critical relationships are also identified. Fully understanding of these management factors and the model can help and enable practitioner to know what new capabilities should be deployed and developed in the long run for maximizing sustainability.

Turn-key and CMF(CM for Fee) have been selected as procurement paths of large public projects in Korea. However, recently, researches and discussions on CMR(CM at Risk) have been popular as the Korean government seeks for alternative procurement paths to enhance the performance. In the CMR projects, the part who is responsible for construction management should predict and control the potential risks for guaranteeing benefits. In this paper, CMR projects in which a general contractor plays the role as CMr is mainly analyzed. We give attentions to risk management during construction process given that subcontractors, main parts in this phase, work in various ways and thus more chances for faults exist. In this case, for the general contractor, to recognize potential risks in previous to start construction works of subcontractor by means of virtual design and construction (VDC) must be essential to this end. The case study of practices on VDC in U.S in which CMR has been introduced can provide considerable aspects to implement it in Korea.

Previous research on super high rise buildings focused mostly on the use of public space from building plan perspective, survey of residents' satisfaction evaluation, construction technology and structural technology. But little research is done on the economic analysis of landmark factors. The purpose of this study is to find landmark factors that can be quantitatively measured, collect data on super high rise residential buildings in Seoul. Find the intrinsic values of the landmarks, and analyze how these values differ in areas with different densities, i.e. in 3 Gangnam-gus & Yeongdeungpo-gu and in other areas. It is expected that the results of this study can be used to set an appropriate price of super high rise building in consideration of its landmark value in different area

4D simulation integrates the 3 dimensional model of a building with the construction schedule, and it leads to the possibility of virtually checking the construction process and the building itself in advance. However, the existing problem of 4D simulation is the difference between the demands of architects, engineers, and construction site workers in 4D simulation. This study suggests the possible way to enhance the availability of 4D simulation, considering more the practical demands from the construction site. In order to conduct this study, we build a 3D BIM model of a business-residential complex and link the model with the pre-defined construction schedule in order to make a 4D simulation. This study concludes with the optimized 4D simulation methodology based on BIM model considering the demands in perspective of the construction site. It would contribute to the harmonic collaboration among architects, engineers, and labors in the construction site when using 4D simulation based on BIM model.

Construction companies in Korea have shown interest in BIM (Building Information Modeling) even if late, adopted it, and applied it to several projects. But, it is hard to figure out the status of BIM implementation. Thus, this study is to figure out the status of BIM implementation in Korea by surveying major construction companies in Korea and comparing with similar surveys abroad. The survey result shows that only 11 companies in Korean construction industry adopted BIM. The clash check (73%) was mostly used among various BIM functions and other functions were used less than 30%. As of 2008, only 8 construction companies have used BIM in 27 projects and thus, Korean companies are in the BIM introduction period. Therefore, successful introduction of BIM is required by benchmarking the BIM introduction process of overseas construction industries

In Korea, the government has developed SEUMTER, an administration system for building related public service, to facilitate and promote the electronic submission and permission activities. SEUMTER is progressing legality system based on 2D drawing for building administration permission service. However, there are a lot of problems related to legality system owing to complexity of Korea regulation relation and structure, inefficiency of legality system based on 2D drawing, duplication examination of document (soliciting forms for civil affairs) and drawing. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop legality system for building administration permission service based on BIM in Korea. To achieve this purpose, the authors have investigated permission procedure and regulation structure that is used in current building administration permission and suggested permission procedure and regulation structure for legality system based on BIM. In addition, the authors have investigated element technologies (for examples, method of structured regulation, BIM model checker, Viewer, etc) for legality system based on BIM. Finally, the authors have suggested strategy and hereafter direction for application of legality system based on BIM.

The objective of this research is to develop a knowledge discovery framework which can help project teams discover useful patterns to improve energy efficient building design. This paper utilizes the technology of data mining to automatically extract concepts, interrelationships and patterns of interest from a large dataset. By applying data mining technology to the analysis of energy efficient building designs one can identify valid, useful, and previously unknown patterns of energy simulation modeling.

Estimating the reasonable construction-cost according to the construction phase in public construction is an important element for securing and executing a national budget efficiently. As a general rule, the predetermined cost of construction is estimated at the end of the design of the target structure. Therefore, it seems to be a considerably difficult problem to estimate the approximate cost of construction, only with its basic information of the bridge in the design planning phase and the early design stage where we can not have specific detailed-section of the target structure. In this paper, we present the calculation of construction-cost in the planning phase based on the analysis of factors affecting the cost of construction conducted in the previous study. Beside, to estimate the cost of construction in early design phase, we would like to present the calculation of construction-cost in the early design phase by executing the analysis of data collected from 61 steel box bridges. It was found from the result of study that the estimated cost of construction gained by the calculation of construction-cost in this paper reduces the error between the real cost of construction and that by the existing method of using.

Change orders represent one of the largest sources of cost growth on construction projects, but an efficient change management control system can help the projects steer clear of the constant construction changes. This study was performed to achieve a better understanding of all changes and to develop a new set of Best Practices using process mapping techniques. The project data for this research were collected from case studies of aviation projects implemented in Houston, Texas at Bush Intercontinental Airport. The findings and contributions of this research should help owners and project managers determine and identify major causes that impact project budget and schedule and implement solutions prior to them surfacing.

Business process engineering (BPE) is a top-down management approach for increasing efficiency and productivity through radical and fundamental changes to the business processes of the organization. BPE requires firms to initially develop a model of the existing business processes of the firm to distinguish functional tasks from processes used for coordinating inputs, activities and outputs. The model is used for understanding the business processes in the organization and to simulate the effect of changes to the processes. The model can also be used to justify business processes, which involves assessing whether the business process provides value to the customer in its current configuration. Justification requires a careful examination of the key business processes used by the firm to identify systemic shortcomings in the process and to create a new business process to produce greater efficiency. BPE also considers automating as many business processes as possible to increase operational efficiency and the integration of business process tasks. The construction industry has been slow to adopt BPE because of its project approach in which a major firm contracts with various functional service providers and regards each project as unique. The industry focuses on functional task efficiency rather than business process efficiency. There is no formal methodology or criteria for determining whether a business process is effective for a construction firm in its current configuration. The use of performance measures such as costs, task duration times or other metrics can be useful in evaluating the effectiveness of an existing business process and for modeling the possible outcome of a fundamental and radical change to the process.

It is a common practice in Hong Kong for the main contractors of local building projects to sublet most of the work to subcontractors. Consequently their roles have gradually transformed from a constructor to a manager of subcontractors. The outcomes of a project therefore depend heavily on the subcontractors' performance. However, most of the subcontractors complain that they are unable to efficiently and effectively operate due to site coordination problems, such as inaccurate site reference lines, caused by main contractors. The site problems may consume significant amounts of resources if practical solutions cannot be agreed by the project participants early enough. Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II (ROCI-II) model was developed by M.A. Rahim that measure five types of conflict management style including Integrating, Obliging, Dominating, Avoiding and Compromising. This paper presents the questionnaire survey based on the ROCI-II model to rank the preference on the conflict management style adopted by the project representatives of the subcontractors in handling the site coordination problems and its impact to the time used to agree the solutions to the different types of site coordination problems with main contractor. The survey results show that most of the subcontractors' project representatives preferred to adopt the Compromising style to tackle the site coordination problems and the time used to agree the solutions with main contractor was influenced by the conflict management style adopted.

In the building construction, the specialist contractors play the important roles in the point of the quality securing. Therefore, it is very important for the construction industry to study the sub-package problem. The sub-package problem includes two problems which should be solved. One is to decide the scope of works of each specialist contractor, and another one is to decide the particular specialist contractor which carries out the work. However, the sub-package problem in Korea is not clarified yet, although the circumstance around it has changed rapidly. Many factors influence to the sub-package problem regardless of internal factors or external factors of the project. The general contractor usually decides the sub-package under considering the project conditions. In case of the internal factors, each general contractor manages the organization and materials. But the external factors are relatively more difficult to control and predict than internal ones. But out of the external factors, the legal system has very close relationship with a sub-package problem especially in Korean construction system. So, this paper clarifies relationship between the legal system relating subcontracting and the state of sub-package.

Determining the total duration for a construction project is an integral part of project management in the construction industry. This is to ensure the project and all its associated activities can be carried out and completed within the time frame stipulated. There are several commonly used scheduling methods and techniques in project management, some of which involves manual calculation while others involve computer software. This paper looks into the various time determination methods, extracting out their differences and similarities. It also seeks to draw out the problems when determining time for projects, especially those encountered of case studies. Based on the results from the case studies, there were delays on certain projects even though time determination had been carried out rigorously prior to the commencement of the projects. This paper seeks to develop a time determination model, which incorporates risk management techniques into the calculations in order to improve the method for time estimation to minimize the chances of project delay.

BTL projects, which has been 3 years since it was carried out in 2008, trigged the controversy on the adequacy in the calculation of disbursement for Government due to such problems as low earning rate and the burden of service level compared with the project suggestion. Thus, the purpose of this study is to offer a suggestion on the calculation system for the purpose of the standardized - expense appropriation by item and database including the antecedent study on the finance model and the feasibility in BTL projects. The system is composed of 4 steps - project management, basic database, an analysis on expense by item and the result, and an analysis on sensitivity, and it is possible to carry out a comparative analysis on single and multi alternatives by variable change along with the ground on expense calculation.

Earth-moving operation has a great impact on the overall budget and schedule of any heavy civil projects. More often than not, the operational decisions are made largely based on field personnel's experience and judgment. In particular, decisions on earth moving operations by scraper-dozer fleets have been heavily influenced by the following belief: "The longer a dozer pushes a scraper for loading, the better earth-moving productivity is gained by the fleet." Even though there is some truth to this notion, scraper-dozer earth moving operations involve a much complex process that requires a systematic analysis for predicting the maximum production. To this end, this paper presents a spreadsheet-based scraper-dozer fleet operation model for its production optimization. Various optimization techniques, including a genetic-algorithm method, are presented for comparison and each technique's pros and cons are discussed.

As the use of new and renewable energy is one of the ways by which the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the other existing environmental problems can be addressed, a policy of spreading information regarding it and of conducting R&D related to it is currently being implemented in advanced countries. In the construction field, the concept of "green building" was born, and the application of this concept has increased, with the end in view of achieving energy savings, resource savings, and recycling, and of conserving the natural environment. In this context, the government of Korea amended the "Law on the Development, Use, and Promotion of New and Recycled Energy" in 2004, which contains 11 provisions related to new and renewable energy and their sources, including solar and geothermal energy as well as sunlight, water, rainfall, and organisms. Since solar-energy should be used instead of fossil fuels by converting sunlight directly into electricity, many researches on this subject are in progress. There are few researches, however, employing the economic approach to the subject. Thus, in this study, an economic assessment of the solar-energy system was conducted using both life cycle cost (LCC) analysis and sensitivity analysis. The results of the LCC analysis show that the solar-energy system will become economically better than the fossil fuel system after 16 years, although the initial construction cost of the solar-energy system is higher than that of the fossil fuel system. The results of this study are expected to be used in selecting an eco-friendly and economical solar-energy system when the construction of a green building is planned.

Decision making at the early stages of a construction project has a significant impact on the project, and various scenarios created based on the owner's requirements should be considered for the decision making. At the early stages of a construction project, the information regarding the project is usually limited and uncertain. As such, it is difficult to plan and manage the project (especially cost planning). Thus, in this study, a cost model that could be varied according to the owner's requirements was developed. The cost model that was developed in this study is based on the case-based reasoning (CBR) methodology. The model suggests cost estimation with the most similar historical case as a basis for the estimation. In this study, the optimization process was also conducted, using genetic algorithms that reflect the changes in the number of project characteristics and in the database in the model according to the owner's decision making. Two optimization parameters were established: (1) the minimum criteria for scoring attribute similarity (MCAS); and (2) the range of attribute weights (RAW). The cost model proposed in this study can help building owners and managers estimate the project budget at the business planning stage.

Recently, public office building projects are being recognized by many construction engineers and researchers, as the critical projects in the construction industry. The project budgets have sometimes exceeded due to the lack of core knowledge, experiences, skills and experts concerned in cost planning and estimating in the pre-construction stage. It has been highlighted that planning and estimating effectively the cost of public office building projects as critical in the design stage. Within this context, some cost data books and systems, such as RSMeans cost data systems and Spon's price book, have been systematically developed and used by many construction cost managers and organizations in order to effectively estimate and use their project budgets. As a result of this research, a cost estimating model for finishes has been developed, considering the cost data used in public office building projects.

In China, the Reform-Open policy was executed in 1978. During the following 30 years, the economic regime in China had been changed to a socialist market economy from a socialist planned economy, and the construction industry in China has been achieved high economic growth. However, as the construction project increasing, a lot of problems which affect the construction expense payment occur. And it is a fact that the construction expense payment disputes have become a serious problem now. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the problem of Chinese construction expense payment. In this paper, we would like to clarify the difference of the legislation of construction expense payment between China and Taiwan Region.

Bridges are vital components of any road network which demand crucial and timely decision-making for Maintenance, Repair and Rehabilitation (MR&R) activities. Bridge Management Systems (BMSs) as a decision support system (DSS), have been developed since the early 1990's to assist in the management of a large bridge network. Historical condition ratings obtained from biennial bridge inspections are major resources for predicting future bridge deteriorations via BMSs. Available historical condition ratings in most bridge agencies, however, are very limited, and thus posing a major barrier for obtaining reliable future structural performances. To alleviate this problem, the verified Backward Prediction Model (BPM) technique has been developed to help generate missing historical condition ratings. This is achieved through establishing the correlation between known condition ratings and such non-bridge factors as climate and environmental conditions, traffic volumes and population growth. Such correlations can then be used to obtain the bridge condition ratings of the missing years. With the help of these generated datasets, the currently available bridge deterioration model can be utilized to more reliably forecast future bridge conditions. In this paper, the prediction accuracy based on 4 and 9 BPM-generated historical condition ratings as input data are compared, using deterministic and stochastic bridge deterioration models. The comparison outcomes indicate that the prediction error decreases as more historical condition ratings obtained. This implies that the BPM can be utilised to generate unavailable historical data, which is crucial for bridge deterioration models to achieve more accurate prediction results. Nevertheless, there are considerable limitations in the existing bridge deterioration models. Thus, further research is essential to improve the prediction accuracy of bridge deterioration models.

The role of cost modeller is to facilitate the design process by systematic application of cost factors so as to maintain a sensible and economic relationship between cost, quantity, utility and appearance which thus helps in achieving the client's requirements within an agreed budget. There are a number of research on cost estimates in the early design stage based on the improvement of accuracy or impact factors. It is common knowledge that cost estimates are undertaken progressively throughout the design stage and make use of the information that is available at each phase, through the related research up to now. In addition, Cost estimates in the early design stage shall analyze the information under the various kinds of precondition before reaching the more developed design because a design can be modified and changed in all process depending on clients' requirements. Parametric cost estimating models have been adopted to support decision making in a changeable environment, in the early design stage. These models are using a similar instance or a pattern of historical case to be constituted in project information, geographic design features, relevant data to quantity or cost, etc. OLAP technique analyzes a subject data by multi-dimensional points of view; it supports query, analysis, comparison of required information by diverse queries. OLAP's data structure matches well with multiview-analysis framework. Accordingly, this study implements multi-dimensional information system for case based quantity data related to design information that is utilizing OLAP's technology, and then analyzes impact factors of quantity by the design criteria or parameter of the same meaning. On the basis of given factors examined above, this study will generate the rules on quantity measure and produce resemblance class using clustering of data mining. These sorts of knowledge-base consist of a set of classified data as group patterns, of which will be appropriate stand on the parametric cost estimating method.

Most recent programs in and out of the country are related to urban renewal projects. Contemporary project management information systems have been developed was to manage single or multiple projects focusing on their construction phase, and those have limitations to apply to large-scale complicated mega projects. So, this study explain the core concept of decision support modules for iPMIS (Intelligent Program Management Information System) and its major functions to support project owner and participants by introducing ontology in the web environment. This study confined the scope of research to the planning phase of urban environment improvement projects. Ontological logic structure and relation about planning works is essential parts and three functions to implement decision support module are developed.

Construction documents are recognized as an essential component for making a decision and supporting on construction processes. In construction, the management of project document is a complex process due to different factors such as document types, stakeholder involvement, document flow, and document flow processes. Therefore, inappropriate management of project documents can cause several impacts on construction work processes such as delay or poor quality of work. Several information and communication technologies (ICT) were proposed to overcome problems concerning document management practice in construction projects. However, the adoption of ICT may have some limitation on the compatibility of specific document workflow. Lack of understanding on designing document system may cause many problems during the use and implementation phase. Thus, this paper proposes the framework that integrates Soft System Methodology (SSM) concept and Integrated Definition Modeling Technique (IDEF) for analyzing document management system in construction project. Research methodology is classified as the case study. Five main construction building projects are selected as case studies. The qualitative data related to problems and processes are collected by interviewing construction project participants such as main contractors, owners, consultants, and designers. The findings from case study show the benefits of using SSM and IDEF. The use of SSM can help identify the problems in managing construction document in rich picture view whereas IDEF can illustrate the document flow in construction project in details. In addition, the idea of integrating these two concepts can be used to identify the root causes of process problems at the information level. As the results, this idea can be applied to analyze and design web-based document management system in the future.

Due to various project delivery methods and the complexity of construction projects in the construction industry, developing the framework of construction management for critical, highly complex projects in the construction industry has become problematic. Currently, a set of construction manuals play a pivotal role in planning and managing construction projects as subcontractors try to complete their scope of work according to the instructions of a general contractor. It is challenging for general contractors to write a construction management procedure manual to cover various types of project delivery methods and construction projects. In construction, the construction procedure manuals describe specific actions to be taken through the project. In reality a few contactors own such manuals and their construction schedules include more construction operation activities. Thus, it is hard to estimate the workload and productivity of construction managers because the manual and the schedule do not present the amount of management efforts required to complete a project. This paper proposes a framework to present construction management tasks according to project delivery methods which can be applied to various construction projects. Actions for management tasks were mapped and were integrated with construction activities throughout the project life cycle. The framework can then be used to give specific instructions to project participants, collect management actions, and replicate management actions throughout the project life cycle. The framework can also be can used to visualize complete construction project to analyze and manage construction management activities in each phase of a project in order to enhance productivity and efficiency. The studies of existing construction manuals were carried out to identify construction managers' responsibilities. An artificial intelligence program, CLIPS (C-Language Integrated Production System) was used to search for appropriate actions for impending tasks from a set of predefined actions to be performed for a given situation. The framework would significantly help construction managers to understand interrelations among management tasks or actions within a project. Furthermore, the framework can be embedded into Building Information Modeling (BIM) or Facility Management Systems (FMS) so that designers and constructors would execute constructability review before construction begins.

The purpose of this study is to develop the web-based system for work performance analysis(WPAS). The need of work performance analysis system has already been suggested in many previous researches on the computerization of the performance measurement in the construction site by using the indicators such as time, cost and quality. However, they had focused on measuring or analyzing the result when the project would be over. The WPAS suggests three indicators - work reliability, work effectiveness and work efficiency - to manage the performance of the construction site. It can help the manager more easily recognize the status of on-going work in the construction site by measuring and analyzing the work reliability rate, the work effectiveness and work efficiency every day. This research includes the procedures for WPAS measurement process, database structure of WPAS which was analyzed by the IDEF0 and the data flow diagram. Finally, this research introduces the result of WAPS's case studies and validation in the Korean construction site.

Planning the construction for a system of bored piles in building foundation engineering is (1) to predict the time duration required to complete all the bored piles with due consideration of relevant engineering factors and site constraints; then (2) to predict the total project time generally by aggregating the predicted working duration for construction of each bored pile. The duration for construction of an individual bored pile results from analyzing various working sequences and different activity duration (such as predrilling, excavation, steelfixing, air-lifting, and concreting, etc.), which is informed by experiences and site records of previous projects. However, determining the project duration for constructing many bored piles on one site is much more complicated than adding up the time duration for individual piles. In practice, project schedules are often found to be unrealistic and incorrect during the construction stage. This is because construction planning is not based on a exhaustive and comprehensive evaluation of site factors, such as site layout plan, site constraints, quality control, environmental control, safety control and logical relationships between different trades. In this paper, we identify those factors based on a foundation engineering site in Hong Kong with ninety-seven bored piles and address their effects on uncertainties in activity time and project time.

The current concrete maturity method implemented with temperature sensors requires an extensive wiring, which is not often acceptable on construction site due to harsh working environment. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology appears to provide a solution for the wiring issue because of its ability of sending data wirelessly. An RFID tag integrated with a temperature sensor and placed within fresh concrete may be able to read temperatures of concrete and transmit them to an RFID reader wirelessly in real-time. However the previous research illustrated that the RFID signal gets dispersed in liquid medium. One may speculate then whether RFID signals travel through fresh concrete with high water content. Would the tag's burying depth within fresh concrete affect its readability? The paper presents the preliminary results of our on-going investigation on the readability of RFID tags in concrete against water content and burying depth of tags.

In Japan, it has been argued between architects and contractors that which process is desirable, the traditional process or the design-build process. It is called the contractor-designer issue. In 1968, Kajima Corporation chairman Morinosuke Kajima and the Japan Architects Association had a public controversy over it. On the other hand, in practice, architects and contractors have secured quality of buildings thorough a close communication in the design and construction process of building. What are the relationships between architects and contractors? What roles do architects and contractors have in practice? This study has two aims. First one is to analyze the contractor-designer issue based on roles and relationships between architects and contractors, and then to show conflicts between them. Second one is to consider issues which architects face in the relationships with contractors.

This paper presents an overview of six strategic entry points for sustainability in the context of the construction/engineering curriculum. It compares the pedagogical costs and benefits of each approach and shares lessons learned from experiences at two leading public American universities: Georgia Institute of Technology and Virginia Polytechnic Institute. The paper discusses opportunities in terms of two perspectives on the pedagogy of sustainability: Stealthy Sustainability and Flagrant Sustainability, as part of a strategy of diffusion and routinization of this innovation within existing curricula. The paper concludes with a discussion of considerations that should be taken into account when evaluating the potential for sustainability in new educational contexts.

Simulation is becoming increasingly popular in construction for training, planning and for assessment of projects. There are, however, significant problems inherent in simulating construction which are not common to other simulations. This paper describes the development and use of computer-based game for teaching and learning of some aspects of construction project management. It is concerned with the development of a model used to simulate the construction of a rock- and clay-fill dam. It includes detailed physical modelling of the performance of individual pieces of equipment and their interaction with the ground, the geography of the project and the weather in which the equipment operates. The behaviour of all of the individual pieces of equipment when acting as fleets is also discussed. The paper also describes the modelling issues of non-technical aspects of earthmoving operations. These include environmental impact, safety, quality and risks. The problems of integrating these with the physics-based models of the equipment performance are discussed. The paper also draws on real experience of using the game in classes in three universities in different countries.

Training and process analysis in the construction industry has not taken full advantage of new technologies such as building information modeling(BIM). The purpose of this research is to develop a framework for the virtual interactive construction education system using three dimensional technologies. The modules will simulate the construction process for a facility from start to finish using information drawn from real projects in the built environment. These modules can be used as training tools for new employees where they attempt to optimize time and cost in a virtual environment given a limited number of equipment, time and employee options. They can also be used as a process analysis tool for new construction where a number of situational variables can change leading to exposure of potential risk. These modules would be particularly useful for repetitive construction where the initial project is analyzed for optimization and risk mitigation. This paper describes the framework and shows a residential construction example using a 900 square foot wood frame single family house designed for the United States.

Constructing substructures by using Top-Down or Downward method needs an efficient formwork system because of difficulties in supporting concrete slabs from the bottom while excavation is in process. Existing underground formwork systems can be classified by three types: graded ground supported type (Slab On Grade, Beam On Grade), suspension type (Non Supporting Top Down Method), and bracket supported type (Bracket Supported R/C Downward). Each method has its own advantages and limits. Application of a specific formwork system for a given construction site is determined by various conditions and affect construction time and cost. This paper presents a newly developed underground non-supporting formwork system, which combines the advantages of a suspension type and a bracket supported type while it overcomes limits of two types. The developed system has a moving formwork which is supported by suspension cables hanging from the bracket placed at the top of pre-installed substructure columns. Then, the moving formwork is repeatedly lowered down for the next floor below to support concrete slab during curing. The details of this bracket and cable supported system have been investigated for the improvement of easiness in construction.

The temperature control of in-place concrete is the most important factor for an early age of curing concrete. Heat stress of mass concrete caused by the heat of hydration can induce the crack of concrete, and a frost damage from cold weather casting concrete results defect on compressive strength and degradation of durability. Therefore, success and failure of concrete work is dependant on the measurement and control of concrete temperature. In addition, the compressive strength assessment of in-place concrete obtained from the maturity calculated from the history of temperature make a reduction of construction cycle time, possible. For that purpose, wireless temperature measuring system was developed to control temperature and assess strength of concrete. And, it was possible to monitor the temperature of concrete over 1km apart from site office and to take a proper measure; mesh-type network was developed for wireless sensor. Furthermore, curing control system that contains the program capable to calculate the maturity of concrete from the history of temperature and to assess the compressive strength of concrete was established. In this study, organization and practical method of developed curing control system are presented; base on in-place application case.

The limited public funds available for infrastructure projects have led governments to consider private entities' participation in long-term contracts for finance, construction, and operation of these projects to share risks and rewards between the public and the private. Because these projects have complicated risk evolutions, diverse contractual forms for each project member to hedge risks involved in a project are necessary. In light of this, Build-Operate-Transfer(BOT) model is considered as effective to accomplish Public Private Partnerships(PPPs) with a characteristic of an ownership-reversion. In BOT projects, the government has used such an incentive system as minimum revenue guarantee(MRG) agreement to attract the private's participation. Although this agreement turns out critical in success of BOT project, there still exist problematic issues in a financial feasibility analysis since the traditional capital budgeting theory, Net Present Value(NPV) analysis, has failed to evaluate the contingent characteristic of MRG agreement. The purpose of this research is to develop real option model based on option pricing theory so as to provide a theoretical framework in valuing MRG agreement in BOT projects. To understand the applicability of the model, the model is applied to the example of the BOT toll road project and the results are compared with that by NPV analysis. Finally, we found that the impact of the MRG agreement is significant on the project value. Hence, the real option model can help the government establish better BOT policies and the developer make appropriate bidding strategies.

Top-down method is widely used for urban area construction for its advantages in reducing environmental problems such as dust and noise, and saving construction cost depending on given conditions of a construction site. Because the excavation and construction of super- and sub-structures of the building have to be proceeded simultaneously, a column has to be embedded prior to excavation. This column is called a pillar column or pre-founded column. Usually a wide flange section is used for these columns. To place the columns, usually the diameter of casing holes needs to be larger than the section of the wide flange itself in order to accommodate a couple of tremie pipes for pouring concrete. In this paper, a newly developed method of using circular pipe as an alternative to the existing wide flange section is discussed. The crucial part of the new method is to develop a connection between the circular column and concrete flat slabs. For shear force transfer from concrete slab to the concrete filled tube (CFT) column, shear jackets with studs and shear bands are proposed. The studs are welded on the jackets at shop and placed around the circular column on site. The shear bands are welded on the outer side of the CFT at shop and inserted into ground with the CFT. Test results and application of the method to a construction site are also provided in this paper.

With the rapid development of China economy, many engineering projects with large scale and investment were constructed in China and some were the biggest ones in the world. With the development of engineering practice, great progress in the research of engineering management of China was made and a large number of research findings were embodied in content of research papers and were represented by technical words. To know the state of arts in the research field of engineering management in China, three major parts, namely title, abstract and keywords of research papers in last five years from three representative Chinese journals about engineering management were chose as research materials. Unlike western languages, there are no delimiters between the words of Chinese, so the maximum matching and frequency statistics (MMFS) method, a text segmentation technique of text mining Chinese, was presented to extract the features consisting of technical words, phrases and words from the research materials. Recent research and developing trend of engineering management in China were found by comparing and analyzing the difference of technical words in the research materials of last five years.

Current construction simulation approaches mostly focus on operation aspects of construction projects, ignoring managerial aspects which can radically change operational profiles (e.g., number of resources, expected productivity level, or daily working hours) during the course of construction. As a result, these approaches may mislead construction managers into unrealistic execution plans as well as make them difficult to find potential performance improvement areas. As an effort to address this issue, this paper establishes a comprehensive construction modeling framework which integrates operational and managerial aspects of construction projects. The proposed modeling framework will provide construction managers with more accurate, more reliable, and more realistic simulation results thus reducing the likelihoods of schedule delays and cost overruns.

In respond to the demand of an open, fair, transparent, and efficient environment for procurement, many governments have incorporated the use of internet in their procurement systems with online procurement (e-procurement). Given the different policies and laws which have to be complied with, the practice of government e-procurement system varies from one country to another. Thus, experiences in running e-procurement will vary as well. The achievements and obstacles of one country's experience will be a constructive reference for other countries in establishing e-procurement system. In this regard, government e-procurement system practices in two Southeast Asia countries i.e., Thailand and Indonesia particularly in public works are consecutively presented and finally compared in this paper. The government of Thailand has applied Online Auctions (e-Auctions) as the national procurement practice since 2005 and performed the e-Auctions in two types: Reverse Auction and Sealed Bid Auction. Contrary to the common practice of e-procurement, the Thai government, with some rationales, runs the bid documents obtaining manually as well as qualification and technical documents submission and holding the e-Auctions at bidding office. Whereas Indonesian government runs Online Sealed Bid Bidding (e-Procurement) and most of the bidding stages are performed electronically except bid evaluation for both technical and financial. The advantages and drawbacks of these two e-procurement practices are discussed as well as improvements that have to be made for successful of e-procurement.

Lately, Building Information Modeling (BIM) emerges as the most promising technology, now is expected to bring a great deal of improvement of productivity in every aspect of the construction industry. One of the BIM based scheduling is to use BIM model as a base for applying to schedule analysis and simulation tools. This type of tools may incorporate a various types of information such as the building model, construction method information, resource information, productivity information, rules and constraints to optimize activity sequencing. This paper proposes a framework of BIM based simulating system which can be used to optimize construction processes, especially for the floor construction cycle. For the purpose, all of the necessary components of the system will be defined and represented, and next an algorithm will be introduced to demonstrate the principle of simulating operation. The benefits of this technique are basically two : to test and optimize construction methods in respect of the construction duration and to reduce the floor construction cycle.

Recently, the construction industry is getting more complex and sophisticated having the characteristics of a mega project. Mega project pursues a value that can't be gained with an approach of seeing a project as just a simple sum of different parts but a mutual combination. However, the current manuals can't fulfill the needs for supporting, therefore, need a tool to support the decision making and an IETM is expected to take this role. Despite the a lot of expected advantages of IETM, it is still difficult to apply because of the frequent changes of information of detailed process and its complexity. In this research, as part of developing an IETM, we aim to propose a system frame which is based on the analysis of processes of a project. It is basic part of IETM to give information to users and IETM consists of normal mode that offers general information about the urban regeneration project and user-specified mode that gives classified and reorganized information to user. For supporting these functions, IETM should be stored in a form that can classify the information about urban regeneration project and be tagged with meaningful tags. Moreover IETM developers have to consider the interoperability of IETM because it ultimately should be coordinated with overall Project Management System like an iPMIS. We used XML for solution of interoperability because it stores information as just text-file that doesn't need a special form.

While many studies on feasibility analysis for housing projects have been released, the main focus was on economic feasibility and factors related to developers were not clearly identified enough to be used in practice. In order to establish a feasibility analysis model for apartment development projects requested by developers in Korea, 31 driving factors behind projects' success were identified under seven different categories. Criterions of the each factor were also developed, and weight of each factor was assigned by applying the Analytical Hierarchy Process(AHP). Finally, based on the Monte Carlo simulation, the feasibility analysis model was established, providing probability distribution of project's grade. The model was applied to 12 housing projects to verify its reliability, and found that the model properly filtered projects that are unlikely to be profitable, indicating reasonable reliability of the model. The model can be a useful tool for contractors, especially with less experience in analyzing project development feasibility.

The problem of urban decay in Hong Kong has drawn much attention of both practitioners and academics. Poorly managed buildings not just give a negative image to the Pearl of the Orient in the region, but also pose potential risk hazards to the health and safety of the general public. While it is necessary to devise a comprehensive plan on redevelopment and urban planning, preserving the existing buildings to maintain their conditions for habitation can be a short-term option to safeguard quality standard. With the increasing number of ageing buildings in Hong Kong, a lot of research efforts have been devoted to managing repair and maintenance projects properly (for example those initiated and funded by the Construction Industry Institute, Hong Kong; and the current study financially supported by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University). Given the short duration and more diversified nature of work, building repair and maintenance works are found to be more difficult to monitor and regulate when compared with new works. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis on the problems of running building maintenance projects. An extensive review of contemporary literature was firstly conducted, which forms a solid basis for developing an empirical study on the problems and difficulties of running building maintenance projects from the viewpoints of industrial practitioners with a view to formulating effective strategies for managing maintenance projects successfully.

Fire safety management on any construction site should start with recognizing fire risks in the workplace, understanding the extent of the risks, and proper assessment of the controls necessary to reduce the risks. However, the most important step to prevent fire-related accidents on jobsites is the constant review and monitoring of processes and controls by all individuals involved. This study was conducted to analyze the effectiveness of using computer simulation as an addition to maps or floor plans in safety training and management. Simulex was used on a real project to model various egress routes and to identify potential problem areas of the evacuation strategy. This study highlights the efficacy of simulated emergency evacuation as a training tool that visually shows constantly altering means of egress.

Safety is a big issue in the construction sites. For safe and secure management, tracking locations of construction resources such as labors, materials, machineries, vehicles and so on is important. The materials, machineries and vehicles could be controlled by computer, whereas the movement of labors does not have fixed pattern. So, the location and movement of labors need to be monitored continuously for safety. In general, Global Positioning System(GPS) is an opt solution to obtain the location information in outside environments. But it cannot be used for indoor locations as it requires a clear Line-Of-Sight(LOS) to satellites Therefore, indoor location monitoring system could be a convenient alternative for environments such as tunnel and indoor building construction sites. This paper presents a case study to investigate feasibility of Wi-Fi based indoor location monitoring system in construction site. The system is developed by using fingerprint map of gathering Received Signal Strength Indication(RSSI) from each Access Point(AP). The signal information is gathered by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, which are attached on a helmet of labors to track their locations, and is sent to server computer. Experiments were conducted in a shield tunnel construction site at Guangzhou, China. This study consists of three phases as follows: First, we have a tracking test in entrance area of tunnel construction site. This experiment was performed to find the effective geometry of APs installation. The geometry of APs installation was changed for finding effective locations, and the experiment was performed using one and more tags. Second, APs were separated into two groups, and they were connected with LAN cable in tunnel construction site. The purpose of this experiment was to check the validity of group separating strategy. One group was installed around the entrance and the other one was installed inside the tunnel. Finally, we installed the system inner area of tunnel, boring machine area, and checked the performance with varying conditions (the presence of obstacles such as train, worker, and so on). Accuracy of this study was calculated from the data, which was collected at some known points. Experimental results showed that WiFi-based indoor location system has a level of accuracy of a few meters in tunnel construction site. From the results, it is inferred that the location tracking system can track the approximate location of labors in the construction site. It is able to alert the labors when they are closer to dangerous zones like poisonous region or cave-in..

With overall opening of global construction market by World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements, importance of management efficiency of construction industry which considers both tangible and intangible assets is recently being recognized in our nation. That is, efforts for reinforcement of competitiveness must be placed through maximization of values of internal and external intangible assets of construction industry such as management innovation, information, investment in technology and R&D and intellectual property. Accordingly in this study, evaluation criteria for intangible assets of construction industry were investigated and classified. Using such criteria, evaluation index and model were established based on the degree of importance of each criterion. The purpose of this study is to review importance of intangible assets in terms of competitiveness and management efficiency of construction industry and to provide basic data for establishment of intangible assets and revitalization of investment.

The importance of cost estimate in early stage such has been increasing due to market change and severe competition in construction industry. Because the adjustable budget is only 20% after design stage, most of the crucial decisions to influence cost is made in the early stage. However, in the early stage, the project scope is not defined completely so that estimator has inaccurate information to make critical decision. Therefore, this research suggests the cost estimate method using case-based reasoning. Case-based reasoning is appropriate for the early cost estimating, as it has the strength of rapidity and convenience in cost estimation. This research analyzes 84 actual data of public apartment on the scale of 11~15 stories. In order to extract the most similar case, at the first step this research identifies influence factors and calculates attribute similarity. In case-based reasoning, the most challenging task is determining attribute weight. At the third step, this research calculates case similarity which is aggregated attribute similarity multipled by attribute weight. Finally, extracts the most similar case which has the highest score of case similarity.

In past projects, the main goal has been to enhance efficiency by reducing cost and time. However, considering the current condition of safety management in many construction companies, it can be confirmed that safety management has not been a top priority for a long time. Current safety management, which is based on safety standards and rules, is very ineffective and only emphasizes management after an incident. As well, although fewer accidents occur compared to the past, because construction projects are increasingly large in scale and complex, these accidents tend to be more serious and involve greater monetary loss. Furthermore, as the severity of these accidents increases, so does the possibility of fatalities. Therefore, improving safety management is essential. This study proposes an effective program for safety management, focusing on the processes to connect studies and systems, and the basic techniques required for program development. To realize this program, technical tools are suggested, including systems such as BIM (Building Information Modeling); additionally, the coordination of other systems such as an RTLS, a server, and an alarm system is proposed.

In Singapore, the construction industry's performance in safety has often been the worst among the other industries. This paper seeks to compare the efforts of the shipbuilding and repair industry and the construction industry in improving the level of safety performance. One key factor identified in the paper will be the subcontractors' role in the safety aspect. Based on the analysis of statistic carried out by the Ministry of Manpower of Singapore and many others, this paper aims to identify the success of the shipbuilding and repair industry and gives thought as to how the construction industry can further improve its safety record.

Pipeline construction is a highly repetitive and resource-intensive process that is exposed to various constraints and uncertainties in the working environment. Effective look-ahead scheduling based on the most recent project performance data can greatly improve project execution and control. This study enhances the traditional linear scheduling method with stochastic simulation to incorporate activity performance uncertainty in look-ahead scheduling. To facilitate the use of this stochastic method, a computer program, Stochastic Linear Scheduling Method (SLSM), was designed and implemented. Accurate look-ahead scheduling can help schedulers to better anticipate problem areas and formulate new plans to improve overall project performance.

The research investigates for the relationship between the operating performances of the make-ready process and project production performance. To this end, the researchers proposed a metric of PCR (Percentage of Constraint Removal) to measure the make-ready performance. The study measured the production performance in two ways: production planning reliability and progress performance. We hypothesized that how well the make-ready process is performed has an impact on the degree of production performance. The statistical analyses are used to investigate that how operating performance of the make-ready process affects project production performance. The results of the regression analysis support our hypotheses (p<0.25) and correlation coefficients for the relationship between project production performance and make-ready performance are also significant (p<0.05).

Many schedule delays and cost overruns in interior construction are caused by a lack of understanding in detailed and complicated interior works. To minimize these potential impacts in interior construction, a systematic approach for project managers to detect discrepancies at early stages and take corrective action through use of visualized data is required. This systematic implementation is still challenging: monitoring is time-consuming due to the significant amount of as-built data that needs to be collected and evaluated; and current interior construction progress reports have visual limitations in providing spatial context and in representing the complexities of interior components. To overcome these issues, this research focuses on visualization and computer vision techniques representing interior construction progress with photographs. The as-planned 3D models and as-built photographs are visualized in a 3D walk-through model. Within such an environment, the as-built interior construction elements are detected through computer vision techniques to automatically extract the progress data linked with Building Information Modeling (BIM). This allows a comparison between the as-planned model and as-built elements to be used for the representation of interior construction progress by superimposing over a 3D environment. This paper presents the process of representing and detecting interior construction components and the results for an ongoing construction project. This paper discusses implementation and future potential enhancement of these techniques in construction.

Although the evolution and deployment of information technologies will undoubtedly play an important role in the current construction industry, many engineers are still unsure of the economic value of using these technologies. Especially for the planning of a construction project, a collaboration system to utilize the whole resources is a essential tool for the successful outcome. A detailed, authoritative, and readily accessible information model is needed to enable engineers to make cost-effective decisions among established and innovative plan alternatives. Most engineers rely on limited private experiences when they create solutions or design alternatives. Initial planning is crucial for the success of the construction project. Most construction projects are done through collaboration of engineers who have different specialized knowledge. Information technologies can dramatically enhance the performance of the collaboration. For the information delivery, we need a mediator between engineers. Object-based 3-D models are useful for the communication and decision assistance for the intelligent project design. In this paper, basic guidelines for the 3-D design according to different construction processes are suggested. Adequate interoperability of 3-D objects from any CAD system is essential for the collaboration. Basic architectures of geometry models and their information layer were established to enable interoperability for design checks, estimation and simulation. A typical international project for roadway was chosen for the pilot project. 3-D GIS model was created and bridge information models were created considering several requirements for planning and decision making of the project. From the pilot test, the integrated construction project planning using 3-D information models was discussed and several guidelines were suggested.

In competitive society, performance management is an essential element of business success. Despite the importance of performance management, it has not been widely implemented in construction companies. In the recent years, construction companies have become more aware of its need to identify, implement, and sustain performance improvements more systematically. Thus, the objective of this paper is to develop performance management system (PMS) for construction companies. The roles of performance management system is not only measuring performance but also offering guidance to improve performance. Therefore, PMS needs benchmarking process that provides Best Practice and new knowledge. This paper investigates the case of PMSs in UK, USA, Brazil, and Chile and discusses the lessons learned. To overcome the limitations of existing PMSs, new performance measurement framework, in form of 'Construction' BSC, is proposed. Based on the 'Construction' BSC, key performance indicators are derived and methodology of performance management is suggested. This paper concludes by developing PMS for benchmarking in construction companies and recommending some further directions on this research topic.

Today's construction is a large-scale and long life span program, so called Mega-scale project, that every moment constructor faces much of hardships, It is because of a large amount of stakeholders, data and complicated relationship among workers. In order to overcome these problems, IETM(Interactive Electronic Technical Manual) has been introduced to construction industry recently, It is regarded as a useful tool for handling the data, procedures of the construction, but it is similar to existing IT-based information systems, the PMIS(Project Management Information System) and the KMS(Knowledge Management System), without characterizing. This research is intended to find out IETM's property and to present the Ontology scheme discriminating Construction IETM from existing systems..

Managing knowledge effectively is a critical factor for the competitive power of a company. There are efforts to use knowledge as an important resource in many industrial areas and likewise the interest in knowledge management is growing in the construction industry. Nevertheless, there are limitations in the current capture and reuse of knowledge in the construction industry owing to the unique characteristics of the knowledge created during the processes of projects. The knowledge produced during the processes of construction projects is project-oriented, experiential and context specific and due to these characteristics the reuse of knowledge is difficult. In this research, we focus on capturing and identifying the characteristics of construction knowledge and propose a method to apply these characteristics in developing an ontology based construction knowledge retrieval system to improve construction knowledge retrieval and enhance knowledge reuse.

When construction engineers perform their work in the jobsite, they have to record as-built conditions in the project log (Data Collection). On the other hand, the engineers often have to refer to the construction documents when necessary at the job faces (Data Access). The practice of Data Collection and Data Access in the jobsite can be greatly enhanced by utilizing mobile computing with wireless communications. In this paper, two cases of mobile computing applications for construction field management are presented; Mobile Specifications System and Mobile Data Collection System. The demonstration of the process for developing two mobile applications is the primary purpose of the paper. The problems and issues involved with adopting mobile computing for construction field are also presented. The simple information framework for mobile computing has been also proposed as an outcome of the research. As for development tools, readily available relational database and wireless network have been used. The use of commercial mobile broadband was examined for data communication where local area network is not available.

The market of building construction has been competitive in Hong Kong, perhaps as anywhere else in the world. The barrier to entry is low because there are relatively low requirements on the three factors of production - technology, manpower and finance. The prevailing building technology is traditional and labour-intensive. There is also not much need of capital because clients' periodic payments have been the main source of project finance. Further, capitalizing on trade sub-contracting, contractors have been able to keep their direct labour-force small and to transfer much of their business risk to the sub-contractors. Based on interviews to solicit the perception of a sample of building contractors on the particular issues of construction finance, we present the findings in this paper and discuss the various implications. We believe that the current practice of construction financing is both the cause and effect of the competition within, and the competitiveness of, the building construction sector in Hong Kong. We conclude that the building construction sector is "locked or stuck" in this "equilibrium" of traditional technology, reliance on clients' finance and exploitation of sub-contracting. In this "equilibrium" state, there is hardly any motivation for contractors to engage themselves in product or process innovation. Consequently, any talk of industry reform or innovation could only remain just that. We believe that this problem is not unique in Hong Kong. The building construction sector in many other developed and developing economies is posed with similar if not the same problems and constraints. We conclude that there has to be some "external forces" to bring this "equilibrium" state to a higher level "equilibrium" one where higher value-added building construction services are supplied and demanded. This is a state where building contractors possessing innovative technology, better financial and manpower resources could thrive to build better buildings with innovative building methods and processes.

Organizational personnel must have well-developed interpersonal skills to deal with the different stakeholders and departments, to work at different levels in the hierarchy, and to meet varying performance requirements. Many leadership development and mentoring programs are designed to expose students as well as construction professionals to contemporary leadership techniques and skills. Leadership skills generally separate into three decision-making styles with varying degrees: 1) Autocratic, 2) Participate, and 3) Free-rein. This paper describes the study of leadership styles among 174 construction professionals and addresses the most appropriate leadership style for a project executive and a project manager in relation to compare with the characteristic leadership style and job functions. The study supports the growing importance of leadership skills as a component of managerial functions and provides a benchmark to identify a dominant leadership skill for a specific managerial position.

In recent years, due to some excellent properties of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites, the use of FRP sheets for strengthening the weak concrete columns have become increasingly popular. Axial loading is the basic assumption in most of the models that are presented for estimating the compression strength of confined concrete columns. However a large number of weak concrete columns in the bending frames are under the combination of both axial and flexural loads. This paper presents the results of an experimental study on the effects of eccentricity of load on the compressive strength of concrete columns confined by FRP sheets. This research shows that the eccentricity of compression load affects decreasingly the performance of confining FRP jacket in confined columns.

This study aims to systematically identify direct and indirect factors that influence labor productivity and to build a model that mathematically quantifies them so as to efficiently manage and increase labor productivity in the construction work. This study was performed based on the productivity model for workers in reinforced concrete construction projects, because it aims to establish a general construction labor productivity model that reflects many factors that influence labor productivity. Using statistical analysis, we found that the components that significantly influence productivity were the worker component, the work characteristic component, the work technique component, the work management component, the equipment & materials component, and the work guide component, while the work delay components did not significantly influence productivity. In addition, a priority analysis was performed based on the components that showed statistically significant effects. The results of the analysis indicated that the influence of work management component and the work technique component is more than that of the worker component and the work characteristic component. The construction labor productivity model that was formulated in this study could be used for the determining the standard productivity during the initial planning stage, so the best strategy for increasing labor productivity could be formulated.

With the world in financial recession, the general trend of global trade is declining. As a result, the world leading shipbuilding industries are confronted with an even more difficult task of mitigating various risks associated with the industries. How well the three shipbuilding industries, Japan, Korea and China, can adapt and manage the risks will be crucial. As the youngest of the top three, the Chinese industry faces greater risks. As it happens to share many factors with that of South Korea in 2004-2005, it is necessary to review and evaluate the risk management plan used by South Korea. This paper presents an evaluation of the risk management plan for shipbuilding industry in South Korea during 2004-2005, considering the financial and political environments at that time. This will help us to structure a plan of risk management for the future.

Before a contractor embarks on exporting its services, it needs to know if it is likely to succeed. This research developed two prediction models to help contractors in Singapore predict the number of projects (Y1) and the contract values (Y2) that they are likely to secure from overseas. Detailed characteristics of 60 contractors who export their services (exporters) were obtained from the database of registered contractors in Singapore. Multiple linear regression models were developed and tests showed that Y1 is a robust model. A contractor's chance of winning more overseas projects may be predicted by the number of projects it acted as a subcontractor; the variety of projects it undertakes; the total contract value in the domestic market; and the number of countries it exported its services to. It is recommended that contractors who are planning to export their services be flexible instead of adopt a focused policy of undertaking only one or two project types in a few selected countries.

Research sponsored by the Korean Government investigated the establishment of a risk management process by Korean contractors involved with plant projects in the Middle East. This research effort builds upon the work completed by the Construction Industry Institute (CII), called the International Project Risk Assessment (IPRA) tool and method, and also explored how CII's Project Definition Rating Index (PDRI) could be incorporated to improve project planning by addressing risks and scope development issues. Specific findings and recommendations were developed including the creation of the Contractor Critical Areas of Concern (CCAC) risk screening tool for Korean contractors pursuing Middle East oil and gas projects.

Currently, Korean real estate market has experienced cooling down of the business because of the global economic crisis which resulted from the subprime mortgage lending practice. In response, the Korean government has enforced various policies at the base of deregulating real estate speculation, such as increasing Loan to value ratio (LTV) in order to stimulate housing demand and supply. However, these policies seemed to result in deep confusion in the Korean housing market. Furthermore, analysis for housing market forecasting, especially international financial crisis on Korean real estate market, has been partial and fragmentary, therefore comprehensive solution and systematical approach is required to analyze the real estate and real estate financial market including causal nexus between market determining factors. In an integrated point of view, applying the system dynamics modeling, the paper aims at proposing Korean Real Estate and Mortgage market dynamics models based on fundamental principles of housing market determined by supply and demand. We also find the impact of deregulation policies focusing on mortgage loan which is the main factors of policies.

Intellectual capital is one of the most valuable assets of any enterprise. This empirical investigation examines the causal relationship between intellectual capital and the performance of architecture firms. More than 100 architecture firms across Taiwan have each been assessed for the levels of human capital, structural capital, relational capital, and business performance. The results suggest that the architecture firms exhibit higher levels of relational capital. However, the firms indicate relatively low levels of human capital. Additionally, the results from the correlation analysis suggest that all the four measures (human capital, structural capital, relational capital, and business performance) are highly correlated. The findings from the path analysis also indicate that human capital may influence the performance of architecture firms via structural capital and relational capital.

The value of intangible assets of a company attracts attention in enterprise management environment drastically changing. Following such a trend, many companies have adopted knowledge management. Especially in construction industry of which success of a project is easily affected by the capacity of various participants and work performers, we may find many cases to which the knowledge managements have been adopted. However, the domestic design companies have tended to be late to introduce the knowledge management or have difficulty in effective use of KMS already constructed. This study suggests KMS based on BPM (Business Process Management) and drives its effects to improve problems mentioned above. We drives the expected effects by studying the existing studies and surveying domestic design companies and suggests Prototype for introducing a real system.

Many construction activities are related because they share the information of working methods and resources. Generally, the design information for coupled activities needs to be constantly collaborated in the different teams. To achieve the improvement in team collaboration, it is necessary to identify the relative coupled activities in the design teams. The activity and work partitioning arrangements are also required to accommodate the appropriate team members. This paper presents an integral method to be an evaluation in improving the collaboration for teams partitioning. A model, Team Partitioning Method (TPM) was developed to clarify the relationships between activities in a team. The results show the applicability of TPM model in team partitioning for design collaboration.

As buildings nowadays become taller in height and larger in size the safety review of lifting plan takes larger portion in construction project management. However, the cost and safety in lifting plan have a contradictory effect on each other. Therefore, an optimization algorithm needs devising as a solution of the contradictory problem. In many cases at construction sites, selections and stability review of tower cranes are assigned to equipment suppliers or field managers, which cause the problems in safety and cost of the projects. To improve the part of the current situation, a study on the optimization algorithm for designing the foundation of tower cranes is conducted in this study, which can be utilized by equipment suppliers or field managers to check the stability of tower cranes easily and promptly without substantial knowledge.

Construction system modeling can enhance work performance by following the behaviors of a system. System behaviors may originate from physical aspects of a system, namely operation level variables, or from non-physical aspects of a system known as context level variables. However, construction system modelers usually focus on only one type of system variable (i.e., operation level or context level) which can lead to less accurate results. Hybrid modeling with System Dynamics (SD) and Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is one of the approaches that has been utilized to address this issue. In this research, an SD-DES hybrid model of a steel fabrication shop is developed, and the benefits of capturing context level variables together with operation level variables in the model are discussed.

The selection and operation of tower cranes at construction sites are dependent on the personal experience of engineers in charge of lifting work. It often causes to overestimate the safety factor resulting in increase of construction cost, or underestimate it resulting in disastrous accident. Therefore, selection of tower cranes needs to consider cost, safety and maximum lifting condition. This study, for resolving such problems, was intended to propose the algorithm designed for even the inexperienced person to select the optimal lifting equipment in timely manner. The algorithm presented herein is an optimization algorithm that enables automatic arrangement of tower crane and minimization of costs by analyzing such conditions as vertical height and lifting load, etc.

The progress is widely used as a critical index for successful construction project management. In spite of the importance of progress measurement, the excessive management effort to collect and maintain detailed data has been highlighted as a major barrier to measurement of highly accurate progress. In order to reduce the required workload and to enhance accuracy, several researches have been conducted. These researches can be categorized into two groups. First group focuses on automated data collection utilizing advanced technologies only for limited construction tasks. The second group is a research area where the standard progress measurement methodologies encompassing entire construction tasks are investigated. Topics include the adjusting the level of details, standardizing work processes, and applying flexible WBS. However, the techniques for automated data collection are not fully investigated yet in the second group. Combining these two research areas can provide a solution for more effective progress management in terms of enhancing accuracy and optimizing workload. However, there has been no comprehensive research addressing these two research groups in an integrated manner. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology that identifies the most suitable measurement method and data acquisition technology (e.g., GPS, RFID, etc.) for entire construction tasks of a project. The proposed methodology in this paper will be able to facilitate the selection process of data acquisition technologies for entire construction tasks of a project and to support the overall enhancement of automated progress management.

Recently, the building construction industry has been forced to cope with lack of skilled labor. A robot-based construction automation system should help overcome crucial troubles which may be caused by this phenomenon. In particular, it is vital to propose design for automation (DFA). Quality function deployment (QFD) is applied a systematic aid in determining the design reflecting customer's needs. This study employs the QFD approach to plan the component designs of an effective automation process, and presents the development process of DFA with an illustrative project. As a result, the study identifies the developers' design requirements for automated construction and weights them by their importance indices.

An automatic construction system in Korea is now at the stage of the full automation like in Japan, and an actual pilot project is going to be built in 2009. However, in developing a new construction system that has never been implemented before, there is a need to assess the performance and to consider the uncertainty of the system. The program evaluation and review technique (PERT) allows dealing with this uncertainty. Thus, this paper implements an analysis of the process of steel fabrication and makes suggestions for time-related problems arising from the analysis. The time required for steel erection by the automatic system was compared with that in the traditional method. In the result, finding out another construction process and improving robot performance were proposed to resolve the problems. The results will contribute to promoting the development of an efficient system for the new automatic construction system.

To improve construction productivity and quality, and to make the construction environment safe, a new system, Robot-based Construction Automation (RCA), is currently being developed in Korea. To determine whether RCA is an improvement over traditional construction methods (TCMs), an evaluation method, called the Performance Evaluation Index (PEI), is suggested for RCA. The PEI considers the relationships among the factors influencing the performance of the system obtained using the Delphi method and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). As the evaluation shows, RCA is much better than TCM except for three factors: the rate of work success, quality improvement by learning experience, and construction duration.

Workforce information is important in production planning because production planning requires matching a production unit's capacity to loads of assignments. However, tracking and managing workforce information such as skills and accident history is not an easy job. This paper describes a prototype database system for a workforce database system that employs RFID technology. This system tracks daily workforce production capacity on sites. A pilot project is described to explore the benefits and possibility of using radio-frequency identification (RFID) to track and manage workforce information, and is followed by the results of a survey to identify benefits. In addition to the survey identifying the benefits of the database system, the paper also presents a list of challenges through a series of interviews.

General contractors' overhead costs are increasing relative to direct costs. However, it is difficult to apply the traditional activity-based costing directly to the construction site overhead costing because the resource consumption rate per each activity is varied depending on the attributes of activities. The research develops a methodology of hybrid cost allocation system when resources are assigned to cost objects unlike the traditional activity-based costing. The study also develops a database program and demonstrates how it can be applied to the construction projects using a case study.

To design and build a deformed building, new approaches and technologies are required, in which a design approach with parametric and generative technology is used for design and for building it, computer based fabrication technology. Even if parametric design technology is not a state of the art thing, the technology is still used widely, in order to effect the efficiency and furthermore it will continue to be innovated upon continuously. To cope with the limitation of it, the generative design system is developed. Deformed building design requires new methodology to overcome the limitations of conventional ways, which have difficulties to create enough design alternatives to explore satisfied design solutions order to deformed design have geometrical complexity and dramatically increased amount of data. Hence the generative design system can be a cutting edge methodology to solve it. However we should consider how to build the design in the real world. For this, the computer based fabrication technology which is used in mechanical industry is required to introduce to architecture and construction domain for efficiency. In this research, the methodology is modeled and tested with Bezier surface based shell structure.

The attempt to use a 3D model each field such as design, structure, construction, facilities, and estimation in the construction project has recently increased more and more while BIM (Building Information Modeling) that manages the process of generating and managing building data has risen during life cycle of a construction project. While the 2D Drawing based work of each field is achieved in the already existing construction project, the BIM based construction project aims at accomplishing 3D model based work of each field efficiently. Accordingly, the solution that fits 3D model based work of each field and supports plans in order to efficiently accomplish the relevant work is demanded. The estimation, one of the fields of the construction project, has applied BIM to calculate quantity and cost of the building materials used to construction works after taking off building quantity information from the 3D model by a item for a Quantity Take-off grouping the materials relevant to a 3D object. A 3D based estimation program has been commonly used in abroad advanced countries using BIM. The program can only calculate quantity related to one 3D object. In other words, it doesn't support the take-off process considering quantity of a contiguous object. In case of temporary materials used in the frame construction, there are instances where quantity is different by the contiguous object. For example, the formwork of the temporary materials quantity is changed by dimensions of the contiguous object because formwork of temporary materials goes through the quantity take-off process that deduces quantity of the connected object when different objects are connected. A worker can compulsorily adjust quantity so as to recognize the different object connected to the contiguous object and deduces quantity, but it mainly causes the confusion of work because it must complexly consider quantity of other materials related to the object besides. Therefore, this study is to propose the solution that automates the formwork 3D modeling to efficiently accomplish the quantity take-off of formwork by preventing the confusion of the work which is caused by the quantity deduction process between the contiguous object and the connected object.

Compared with other industries, the construction Industry has many parties(A/E/C) as well as many types of construction activities. Especially, as for the remodeling project, the owner group the remodeling union consists of various stakeholders union and requiring the additional activities of demolition except for the existing new building construction project. Like this, the remodeling project has its own characteristics different from a new building construction project. As for the remodeling project, the Owner's decision making for a remodeling alternative has to be preceded, and other parties are required to propose a remodeling alternative which satisfies the Owner's requirements. However, because of time constraints, many types of problems occur during the decision-making process. In consideration of this, in this research, the authors would like to suggest a decision-making support system to help the Owner's decision-making in the early stage of a remodeling project. For this paper purpose of a remodeling decision-making framework based on Building Information Modeling(BIM) was suggested to help with the Owner's decision-making for each remodeling item and the decision-making support system was evaluated through Case Study.

With the help of information and technology development since 2000, there have been increasing number of community forums for communications among future residents through on-line webs after the contracts for purchases have been signed. However, more complaints are being filed since the construction companies take less care of them in the nation. Therefore, a mutual communication system is to be proposed in this paper in order to reduce the complaints in advance due to improper communications, to improve the customer satisfaction, to analyze the troubles for communication, and to provide solutions for better mutual communications

Recently super complex culture shopping facility development seeks consumer' convenience present and are coming restaurant neighborhood, cinema, shopping, hotel etc, according to intensive plan. Such as complex culture shopping facility was developed to most subway station area center and have concept that is space for a main facilities or space for environment protection, citizens' a rest in city. Howeve,r space of recently domestic large size complex culture shopping facility that do not plan systematically was lacking and caused result that do not use efficiently space. Limited extent of research that define complex culture shopping equipment and analyze form of space and present space planning with analysis of research connected with complex usage development.

Haul routes for earthmoving operation need to be carefully selected because the decision on the haul routes could make a significant difference in the project's cost and time. This paper proposes a decision support system for improving productivity of earthmoving operation that helps construction managers choose the best haul routes of trucks based on time slots. Also, a methodology for optimal selection of haul routes considering traffic conditions and topographic conditions of the routes is explained. Raster data model is used to find an available shortest path based on cost weighted distance. A system was developed on a geographic information system environment for efficient database management and easy manipulation of graphical data. A real-world case study was conducted to verify the applicability of the proposed system.

Productivity measurement of construction machinery is a significant issue faced by many contractors especially those involved in earthwork projects. Traditionally, equipment production rate has been estimated using data available in manufacturers' catalogues, results of previous construction projects, or personal experience and assessments of the site personnel. Actual production rates obtained after the completion of a project demonstrate the fact that most of these methods fail to provide accurate results and as a direct consequence, may lead to unrealistic project cost estimations prepared by the contractors. What makes this more critical is that in most cases, inadequate cost estimations lead the entire project to exceed the initial budget or fall behind the schedule. In this paper, a linear regression method to estimate bulldozer productivity is introduced. This method has been developed using SPSS-16 software package. The presented method is used to estimate the productivity of Komatsu D-155A1 series which is commonly used in many earthmoving operations in Iran. The data required for the numerical analysis has been collected from actual site observation and productivity measurement of 60 pieces of D-155A1 series currently being used in several earthmoving projects in Iran. Comparative analysis of the output data of the presented regression method and the existing productivity tables provided by the manufacturer shows that when compared to the actual productivity data collected on the jobsite, a significant increase in accuracy and a remarkable reduction of data variance can be achieved by using the presented regression method.

This study focus on the suggestion of application manual using assembling reference plane design & standard finish material basis upon material classification code. We see it will function as a tool of a linkage between building design and construction standarization in order to enlarge the applicability of house building material that is produced by the module plan. For a estabilishing of this condition, it is neccessary to link the standardization's result of material--design--construction field. According to this neccessity, we are going to suggest information factor that can make relative business manager easily approach to the standardization practical task.

The trend in construction industry, now, lies in improving efficiency and competitive power in construction management and on-the-spot instruction by combining with new IT technology. Above all, it is safe to say that the application of RFID technology can play a pivotal role at this point, but it is not that easy to apply RFID due to the physical, chemical and environmental peculiarities of construction materials. Thus, a study on the standardization of the usable frequency, specifications, protocol, and package administration is required. This study, as part of the study on the standardization, figured out the restrictions by attaching the existing RFID Tag to the construction materials, turned out the prototype of RFID Tag to perform a field test. In result the effective recognition range varies according to the physical and environmental peculiarities of construction materials; and the management efficiency varies as the attaching method and/or applying method. To analyze the management method (media, process etc.) systematically for the existing construction materials; to prepare more various restrictions and its solutions for practical construction spots will be the key for successful RFID implementation.

Safety of workers and productivity in construction site are affected according to the conflict status of work spaces which are performed at a time. The interference among the work spaces in construction site should be minimized because it becomes a blocking factor that causes construction delay and low productivity. Those factors can be managed by reasonable H&S (Health & Safety) practice. This research suggests the requirements of H&S practice and rules to establish the strategy of H&S management based on the literature reviews related to H&S rule. The suggested H&S rule can be visualized for searching space conflict point if the rule is linked with visual simulation tool. Accordingly the research results can be used for improving and visualizing construction productivity by work space control in 4D/nD CAD system.

Bridges are exposed to very severe environment and experience, as service life increased, elevated traffic load and traffic flow, in addition to natural disasters. In comparing to other road structures, bridges may cause more significant damage, such as human-involved accidents, to the society in the event of collapse. A certain level of service shall be necessarily secured to assure the minimum safety of users. The cost for manage and preserve bridges will increase gradually and more restrictions will be loaded to efficiently distribute the limited resources, such as monetary budget and human resource etc. In order to enhance performance and serviceability of bridges with the limited resource, asset management technique has been applied into the bridge management system, which capitalizes the road infrastructures including bridges and assess them in accordance with the government finance report. In the application of asset management, there must be a tool for assess the performance of bridges and this study introduces the basic information on the definition and role of performance measures for asset management for bridges. This research suggests future development direction of performance measure for asset management for bridges in Korea.

When managers estimate exact construction cost at early stage and design phase, they can reduce construction cost in a more efficient way than to predict at construction stage. But, the current of public construction cost estimation and management is concentrated almost after detailed design phase. Therefore, construction cost management in design development phase to generally use approximate estimating is not correct. Also, the existing construction cost used the method that estimated by gross floor area-based cost estimates at design development phase. So, it is difficult to show the specific amount of materials and basis about the estimated cost of the construction. This study derived problems and limits of construction management at design development phase in case of public office building project through review of literature and current survey, and suggested estimating process model process of structural construction cost go improve these matters.

Due to recession in real estate market, interest of risk analysis is increasing. Feasibility study in the first stage takes a great role in a project. There are not objectified tools which are able to cope with uncertainty of project, and feasibility study based on selected method of determinism does not include liquidity of weight risk. Also, shortage of consideration for subjective and atypical external factors causes inappropriate results. Therefore, this study proposes feasibility study model focused on risk factor influences in construction cost and sales cost. Considering effective level of cost based on objective risk factors and probable weight of risk by this model, real workers are able to bring correct and scientific decisions better than former method based on selective analysis of real estate development.

Estimating project costs during the early stage of conceptual planning is very important when deciding whether to approve the project and allocate an appropriate budget. However, due to greater uncertainties involved in a project, it is challenging to estimate costs during this initial stage within a reasonable tolerance. This paper attempts to develop a cost-estimate model for public road projects under these circumstances and limitations. In the conceptual planning stage of a road project, there is only limited information for cost estimation, for example, such input data as total length of the route, origin and destination, number of lanes, general geographic characteristics of the route, and other basic attributes. This implies that the model should individuate suitable but restricted information without considering detailed features such as quantity of earthwork and a detailed route of a given condition. With these limited facts, this paper applies a case-based reasoning (CBR) method to solve a new problem by deriving similar past problems, which in turn is used to estimate the cost of a given project based on best-fitted previous cases. To develop a CBR cost-estimate model, the authors classified 8 representative variables, including project type, the number of lanes, total length, road design grades, etc. Then, we developed the CBR model, primarily by using 180 actual cases of public road projects, procured over the last decade. With the CBR model, it was found that the degree of error in estimation can be reasonably reduced, to below approximately 30% compared to the final costs estimated upon the completion of detailed design.

A gutter-shaped U grating is a facility that is installed at the sides of a road to provide pedestrians with a rainwater-free road. The previous studies on this facility focused mainly on the progress of the efforts that are being made to improve its performance and interception efficiency so as to prevent damages in regional areas due to the heavy rains caused by climate change. The studies on its maintenance, however, are still inadequate. Therefore, this study was conducted to analyze and compare the life cycle costs and performance evaluations of the steel and magic gratings, which are installed in apartments. The results of the study show that the replacement period and rate of gratings differ depending on where they are installed. The initial capital investment cost of a magic grating installed at a road where many vehicles pass is quite high, but in terms of its maintenance and entire-life-cycle costs, its total expenses are lower than those of a steel grating. The results of this study are expected to serve as preliminary data for the selection of an adequate grating that is suitable for particular places in the design phase of construction projects.

Two important concepts in VE are "function" and "cost." Cost can be expressed quantitatively. Unlike cost, the function can only be expressed qualitatively. Thus, to accurately evaluate the performance in VE analysis, it is required that the functional aspect should be considered a qualitative one. This study suggests a procedure of function oriented evaluation which can evaluate function enhancement of a VE proposal more logically and objectively. To conduct this study, problems were induced via case analysis, and solutions were found. In addition, the existing simple evaluation procedures were corrected, and a function enhancement evaluation procedure via function classification was suggested. For function classification, the use of the concepts, which were "intended function" and "additionally obtained function," was suggested. Function oriented evaluation procedure to VE proposals which is suggested in this study is expected to be a great help in treating valuable functions through VE job plan.

A making a decision of construction cost has important meaning and function for both contractor and owner in construction projects. Especially, it should be premised that estimating the construction cost in efficient and rational way in public construction, which is invested by government funds, for efficient execution of the budget and investment as a side of government. The systematic methodology for estimating construction cost approximately of a river facility construction project has not yet been established because of its unique characteristics including its relatively small project size in terms of cost. On this study, It collect and analyze a river facility construction historical cost data for develop an approximate cost estimating model for river applied by typical embankment section method and rate application of the others activity type. And it verify suitability of model through a that result of application of real river facility construction statement at developed model. By this study, it is expected to reasonable and systematic estimating construction cost through application of developed model.

Recently, Construction Projects are being much bigger and more complex. So the importance of Construction Planning and Management is increasing and increasing because of the Construction Projects is involved in a variety of construction-related subjects. Competitive of the Construction Industry decided Cost, Construction Duration and Productivity. But they were just focused on Cost Saving instead of Construction Duration and Productivity. However, they have to finish construction projects using minimum cost and duration with quality and function of required level for successful Construction projects. Thus, current high exchange rate and high period, it is clear to decrease construction cost and to do economic construction in huge Construction Projects and it means more advanced Construction Schedule Management needs for economic construction. But Construction Scheduling Planning, basic of Construction Schedule Management, adjusted contract period without Pre-Planning, just depending on experience and ability of Construction Engineer. Because of that, this study suggests new Duration Estimate Method using Stochastic Model in BIM Environment for advanced Construction Schedule Management. Existing Duration Estimate Methods are just modified wrong points of them or analyzed effective factors of construction schedule. However, New Duration Estimate Method is just consists of Stochastic Model and BIM Environment without existing Duration Estimate Methods. So, new method has creativity and specialty. After this research, it would be a great model in construction industry field.

Ecological Engineering (EE) refers to all sustainable engineering that can reduce damage to ecosystems and that adopts ecology as a base and safety as an orientation in order to implement conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development. In short, EE attempts to safeguard the ecological environment while any essential construction projects proceed. EE encompasses many fields, including construction skills, ecosystem preservation, landscape, and even related cultures and so on. Such variety results in greater complexity of construction, and, consequently, indirectly increases the difficulty of construction quality control. The objective of our research is to explore a promising model for EE via an extensive literature survey. This model includes three principal stages: plan-design, construction, and maintenance, along with individual accompanying phases concerned with quality control and vital management. In this article, a river restoration example is adopted to describe in detail the critical points of quality control in the three stages (plan-design, construction, and maintenance) of the construction life cycle. This study proposes an integrated structure for quality management of EE to guarantee its quality and to enhance its core applications in order to achieve long-lasting preservation of the environment.

In the construction industry, Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is considered to be the most suitable approach and determining the attribute weights is an important CBR problem. In this paper, a method is proposed for determining attribute weights that are calculated with attribute relation. The basic items of consideration were qualitative and quantitative influence factors. These quantitative factors were related to the qualitative factors to develop a Cost Drivers-structural equation model which can be used to estimate construction cost by considering attribute weight. The process of determining the attribute weight-structural equation model consists o 4 phases: selecting the predominant Cost Drivers for the SEM, applying the Cost Driers in the SEM, determining and verifying the attribute weights and deriving the Cost Estimation Equation. This study develops a cost estimating technique that complements the CBR method with a Cost Drivers-structural equation model which can be actively used during the schematic estimating phases of construction.

Many work-related risk factors can cause construction site hazards. Therefore, safety management begins with measuring the magnitude of risk involved in a project. This study proposes a methodology for risk assessment of major trades at a particular construction site. To assess risk, this methodology integrates hazard severity and frequency, and their magnitude is calculated based on actual work-site hazards. This methodology also considers the influence factors that affect the frequency of work-related hazards. To select the appropriate influence factors, a two step approach is deployed. First, the predominant factors are identified through a literature review. Second, a selective process filters out the influence factors that are difficult to analyze quantitatively, and these extracted factors are weighted using expert surveys. Finally, the factors are combined and a quantitative risk assessment methodology is proposed.

With the average life expectancy increasing thanks to better standards of living and medical technology, the number of elderly construction workers in construction sites rises every year to surpass the 450 thousand people in the construction industry (24.7% of all employees in the construction industry). Similarly, the percentage of fatal accidents involving elderly workers has stood at 41~46 percent for the past five years; note that this is significantly higher than the other age groups, making safety measures for dealing with this issue a matter of urgency. This study sought to propose appropriate safety guidelines for elderly construction workers aged 50 years and over by examining the changes in their physical and psychological functions and through the subsequent analysis of the current status and causes of fatal accidents involving them. The guidelines targeted ferroconcrete construction where accidents occur quite often; construction was classified into mold construction, reinforcing rod construction, and concrete construction. Mold construction was further classified into preparation, carry-in, processing, assembly, and disassembly, and reinforcing rod construction, into preparation/transport and processing/assembly. Safety guidelines for each process were presented by dividing them into three aspects considering the changes in the physical and psychological functions according to their ages and type of accident causes: work environment improvement, machinery and equipment improvement, and work method improvement.

The sudden changes in the construction market and the progressively intensifying price wars have amplified the importance of the construction cost estimation in the initial and planning phases of construction projects. However the methodologies and process of estimating construction cost in the planning and design phase are not standardized in the domestic market, in contrast to the markets of more developed countries. Therefore this paper proposes a new approximate estimation model to be used from the initial stages of construction projects. This methodology that extracts, modifies and synthesizes comparable elements of previous cases. This will introduce the foundation for the implementation of systems with improved usability and applicability.

Although there have been many efforts to reduce accidents on construction sites, such accidents continue to occur. New technologies have recently been developed to improve safety and their performance needs to be evaluated to determine their suitability prior to the application. The assessment for safety performance mainly is conducted depending on qualitative and subjective judgment of supervisors. However, there are rarely proper approaches to assess such qualitative measures. Therefore, we propose a fuzzy-based approach to assessing the performance of a new technology. The assessment of a new technology, called a mobile detector (MD), was carried out as a case study. The output is compared with those by a numerical simulation. As a result, the fuzzy-based performance assessment is shown to be appropriate for this evaluation.

The purpose of this study is to analyze elemental maintenance costs for educational buildings. The adapted research method selected three school buildings in Seoul as BTL projects. On the basis of the selected case, the study suggested a model to establish a system for each parts and to estimate analyzed maintenance costs through that system. According to the analysis, the study proposed a partial maintenance costs standard and analyzed proper maintenance costs. The results of this study are as follows 1) The system is divided into 8 large-groups and 24 small-groups for the analysis elemental maintenance costs. 2) The average rations followed by analysis of partial maintenance costs of the three school buildings are as followings, the total maintenance costs are analyzed 3,992 million won and each part of average rations is exterior of building 10.9%, interior of building 41.58%, electricity & fire fighting facility 14.22%, water supply & healthy facility 11.39%, heating & water supply facility 12.93%, landscape 6.3%, civil engineering works 2.69%.

Topographical features in South Korea is characterized that 70% of territory is composed of the mountains that can experience intense rainfall during storms in the summer and autumn. Efficient planning and management of landscape becomes utmost important since the cutting slopes in the mountain areas have been increased due to the limited construction areas for the roadway and residential development. This paper proposed an efficient way of slope management for the landslide risk by developing Web-GIS landslide risk management system. By deploying the Logistic Regression Analysis, the system could increase the prediction accuracy that the landslide disaster might be occurred. High resolution survey technology using GPS and Total-Station could extract the exact position and visual shape of the slopes that accurately describe the slope information. Through the proposed system, the prediction of damage areas from the landslide could also make it easy to efficiently identify the level of landslide risks via web-based user interface. It is expected that the proposed landslide risk management system can support the decision making framework during the identification, prediction, and management of the landslide risks.

Formwork layout is perceived as important due to its strong tie to site works. But, most formwork is done manually and influenced by worker's skill and thus, a lot of construction errors occur. The introduction of BIM (Building Information Modeling) enables acquiring more precise information on the building shape, dimension, structure, etc. than 2D-based drawings and thus, the increased productivity, such as reduction of workload and work times, and the economic efficiency, such as reduction of formwork types and form dimensions with the consideration of constructability, are expected. This study reviewed the previous studies and formwork layout systems to derive this study's differentiations and factors to be first considered for formwork planning were derived by analyzing priorities against consideration factors. Last, a flow chart and algorithm were developed to apply the derived factors to the formwork layout module.

Since improved capacity for RC bridges has been required due to deterioration or increase in traffic, the deflection of cracked reinforced concrete slabs need to be reconsidered. Strengthening is known as the better way to improve capacity of bridges than reconstructing. In this paper, Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP) was introduced as one of the best strengthening methods for civil structures. The structures strengthened with FRPs can improve the strengthening capacity and serviceability. Therefore, CFRP sheet and Glass Fiber-Steel Composite Plate (GSP) in this research were used for strengthening slabs of RC bridges. Experimental data from the strengthening will be helpful to better understand the effect of the strengthening and effective flexural rigidity.

In apartment type of housing, if resident's vehicle is registered in central control office and RFID TAG is issued, identification can be recognized from the time of entrance into parking lot and intelligent parking guide system can be activated based on the residents' profile. Parking Guide System leads a vehicle to the available parking space which is closest to the entrance gate of the vehicle's owner. And when residents forget where they parked their cars, they can query to the Parking Guide and Management System and get responses about the location. For the correct operation of this system, it is necessary to find out where the residents' cars have parked in real time and which lot is available for parking of other cars. RFID is very fancy solution for this system. RFID reader gathers the ID information in RFID TAGs in parked cars and updates the DB up to date. But, when non-residents' cars are parked inside apartment, RFID reader cannot identify them nor know the exact empty/occupied status of parking spaces because they don't react to RFID reader's query. So for the exact detection of empty/occupied status, we suggest the combined use of ultrasonic sensors and RFID. We designed a tree topology with intermediate data aggregators. The depth of tree is normally more than 3 from root (central office) to leaves (individual parking lots). The depth of 2 in tree topology brings about the bottleneck in communication and maintenance. We also designed the information fields used in RFID networks and Sensor Networks.

The Korean government implemented 259 road projects from 2004 to 2007, valued at $18.4 billion. Change orders of these road projects occurred 8,973 times and, subsequently, caused significant increases in the cost of the projects, approximately up to $4.2 billion (22.8% of the initial budget). These significant problems of huge change orders require a more workable control system for budget management whereas the effectiveness of the government's control is still not satisfied. However, previous approaches and studies mostly limited their analyses to simply classifying the causes of the change orders. This paper investigates the real frequency and cost impacts incurred by each cause of a change order, primarily based on 218 road projects in Korea. The paper then identifies the attributes of change orders through a survey of 204 project participants in that those sources were inevitable or avoided if properly managed. The causes of the change orders are further analyzed with analysis of variance (ANOVA) in connection with contract volume, bid award rate, the contractor's capacity to perform, and the design company's capacity. This study found that if the contract volume is smaller, then the possibility of change orders is higher. Interestingly, if the bid award rate is less than 67.5%, it signifies the highest rate of change orders. In addition, the contractors whose construction ability is assessed as the top-ranked group showed the lowest change order rates. With these results, this paper provides the preventive guidelines for reducing the likelihood of change orders.

Performing 'Mega Project' in which various stakeholders are involved is difficult to control due to the respective conflicting objectives. Urban regeneration which is being challenged issue in various ways can be defined as the mega project. Since the mega project like urban regeneration a long-continued project and includes a lot of participants whose benefits conflict, cooperation among stakeholders is essential. Moreover, as the project goes, diverse decision making situations which require collaboration happen, and if proper decision making cannot be given at that time, the whole project would have critical effects. Also, since each activity concerns numerous stakeholders, prompt decision making is difficult in the mega project. Therefore, the objective of this study is to support stakeholder's cooperative decision making in order for conducting successful project. For the purpose of the paper, the concept of cooperation in mega project is redefined and a cooperative decision making framework is suggested. Also, the term of governance, which means cooperative mechanism based on the mutual trust, information sharing and partnership, is applied to the newly defined cooperation. The suggested cooperative decision making framework contains the structure of stakeholders in urban regeneration project which enables participants to understand the relationship among bodies and checklists for supporting decision making appropriately. The application of the framework proposed in this research is expected to contribute subjects' suitable decision making by providing proper information in a timely manner.

Best value in value engineering has relation to cost and performance. But a severe problem in VE study of a project is to reduce value due to loss of performance, caused by focusing on cost reduction. Also a lack of understanding performance concept, no trial VE workshop as well as cost saving-based policy have not satisfied customer needs. A efficient and practical methodology for accomplishing best value in construction projects is proposed. This study developed a more objective approach for performance measurement approach of mega projects and suggested a systematic process of performance quantitative analysis verifying value improvement. The proposed performance measurement method would be very useful for better communication and consensus between stakeholders and VE team especially through value engineering.

If a brief direction and plan for a remodeling project are decided, it may moves to a concrete design step of which to select the most suitable alternative out of applicable compounding devices to reveal dynamic drifting performance. However, the volume of knowledge baseed utility which can refer to systematic evaluation regarding remodeling element technology and the accumulation of realistic cases are not only sufficient, but also short including its system for expression and consistency. Therefore, it may necessary to deliver the main frame which make enables the Owner, designer and builder to get performance technology for applying advanced remodeling element and knowledge based utility. There is a necessity to provide an information with latest made by virtue of modeling in the 3D/4D based on construction-based knowledge etc. which we can use for life cycle of a project, as a prominent way of knowledge based utility. Then, it is sure that remodeling can become more activative by sharing of knowledge based utility formed in electronic 3D/4D which is a systematic and expressed consistently to a performance and applicability in preservation of savings. It is expected for modeling of the 3D/4D in knowledge based utility enables to verify the practicability of each technology on effective application, and the use of technology might be spread widely due its obvious and oriented expressions. Further, this knowledge based utility formed in electronic 3D/4D may applicable for VE process in addition to remodeling design fields.

Design is an act based on multidisciplinary information. The involvement of various stakeholders makes it difficult to process, plan, and integrate. Iteration is frequent in most of the engineering design and development projects including construction. Design iterations cause rework, and extra efforts are required to get the optimal sequence and to manage the projects. The simple project management techniques are insufficient to fulfill the requirements of integrated design. This paper entails two things: design structure matrix and design parameters' information based model. The emphasis has been given to optimal sequence and crucial iteration using design structure matrix analysis technique. The design projects have been studied using survey data from industry. The optimal sequence and crucial iterations results have been utilized for proposed model. Model integrates two things: information about produced- required key design parameters and information of design changes during the design process. It will help to get familiar with Design management in order to fulfill contemporary needs.

Deflections of Reinforced concrete structures must satisfy the permissible values and it is hard to predict the due to uncertainty of deflection of the reinforced concrete structures. Thus, many researchers have suggested a number of experimental equation of deflection against the uncertainty. In a specification, a procedure to evaluate flexure deflection using effective moment of inertia and moment-curvature relation is suggested. ACI offers a method using effective moment of inertia, which has been developed by Branson. Eurocode 2(EC2) suggests a procedure to evaluate deflection of reinforced concrete structure using moment-curvature relation. In this paper, a series of experiments were conducted on the singly reinforced concrete beams which have the same reinforcement ratio and different concrete strength. Therefore, the effect of the concrete strength on the deflection of the beams was analysed. The deflections obtained from the experiment were compared with the deflections calculated with ACI code and EC2.

In recent years, dramatic advances in information technology have motivated the construction industry to improve its productivity. Computer-based information technology includes Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE), Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Digital Mock-Up (DMU) and Product Data Management (PDM). Most construction industries are trying to apply these technologies for quality improvement, reduction of construction time and cost. PDM is very useful for managing data and process related to product design and manufacturing. PDM system has various functions such as drawing and engineering document management, product structure and structure modification management, part classification management, workflow management, and project management. In this paper, PDM system was applied to the design of steel-concrete composite girder bridge. To make a practical guidance for PDM implementation to bridge design, the procedure for its implementation was presented. Consequently, this paper could be useful to enhance the efficiency of bridge design.

Social infrastructure is the basis of public welfare and should be recognized and managed as important assets. Bridge is one of the most important infrastructures to be managed systematically because the impact of the failure is critical. It is essential to monitor the performance of bridges in order to manage them as an asset. But current analytical methods such as predictive modeling and structural analysis are very complicated and difficult to use in practice. To apply these methods, structural and material condition data collection should be performed in each element of bridge. But it is difficult to collect these detailed data in large numbers and various kinds of bridges. Therefore, it is necessary to collect data of major measurement items and predict the life of bridges roughly with advanced information technologies. When certain measurement items reach predefined limits in the monitoring bridges, precise performance measurement will be done by detailed site measurement. This paper describes the selection of major measurement items that can represent the tendency of bridge life and introduces automated bridge data collection test-bed using wireless sensor network technology. The following will be major parts of this paper: 1) Examining the features of conventional bridge management system and data collection method 2) Mileage concept as a bridge life indicator and measuring method of the indicator 3) Test-bed of automated and real-time based bridge life indicator monitoring system using wireless sensor network

On the construction area, Information Technology (IT) has been a considerably significant part over the all phases; plan, design, procurement, construction and post-construction. For example, CALS, CITIC, PMIS, FMS, BIM and etc, designed and applied for managing construction industry are already valuable to improve on the Construction Management (CM). To develop these management methods, lots of mixed-systems are studied and progressed so far. In this paper, more useful and efficient system modules are proposed through investigating PMIS cases implemented, especially medical projects, to improve into FMS on the post-construction. Because most PMIS on the construction phase is used not to continue as FMS, considerable cost and time is consumed to rebuild the system, even both systems have common modules. As these wastes are faced to design systems, the important modules on PMIS are derived and analyzed to apply to FMS to save time and cost on CM.

To achieve the best performance of a project, uncertainties involved in the building construction process need to be identified in the planning phase of the project. Uncertainties seldom create a positive impact on construction project, but they almost cause delay and increase costs. Therefore, risk management plays a significant role in construction to minimize risk occurred due to uncertainties of a project. Although the importance of the risk management has been known to the construction industry, it is not enough to be developed to meet the demands of the industry. It has not been enough for Systems to control schedule risks for managers in the field. Therefore, a tool is necessary to efficiently control risks. The propose of this study is to invent Schedule Risk Control System Module to prepare for risks in preconstruction phase.

Ministry of Land, Transportation and Maritime Affairs has implemented Construction CALS project for improving informationization level of construction industry and for making construction production system efficient. Although an importance of evaluation on level and performance of construction informationziation projects has been emerged, Construction CALS hasn't been evaluated so far. In this study, the performance indicators of construction CALS as the most important base in creating a performance management system were deduced. For this aim, this study reviewed the former researches on system construction for managing performance, analyzed current status of Construction CALS, arranged the relationship between upper strategies and ISP, developed pools of performance indicators, and this study followed IT BSC methodology. As a result, this study developed performance indicators of Construction CALS through four strategies such as globalization and activation of Construction CALS standards, research & development for reaching to international level in construction informationization technology, stabilization of system operation and distribution by publicizing Construction CALS and improving its functions, and policy implementation for managing and coordinating Construction CALS projects. These indicators will be applied to build a system of performance management.

In this paper we propose a framework for an Object Relational IFC Server (OR-IFC Server). Enormous amounts of information are generated in each project. Today, many BIM systems are developed by various CAD software vendors. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) developed by International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) is an open standard data model for exchanging data between the various BIM tools. The IFC provides a foundation for exchanging and sharing of information directly between software applications and define a shared building project model. The IFC model server is a database management system that can keep track of transactions, modifications, and deletions. It plays a role as an information hub for storing and sharing information between various parties involved in construction projects. Users can communicate with each other via the internet and utilize functions implemented in the model server such as partial data import/export, file merge, version control, etc. IFC model servers using relational database systems have been developed. However, they suffered from slow performance and long transaction time due to a complex mapping process between the IFC structure and a relational-database structure because the IFC model schema is defined in the EXPRESS language which is object-favored language. In order to simplify the mapping process, we developed a set of rules to map the IFC model to an object-relational database (ORDB). Once the database has been configured, only those pieces of information that are required for a specific information-exchange scenario are extracted using the pre-defined information delivery manual (IDM). Therefore, file sizes will be reduced when exchanging data, meaning that files can now be effectively exchanged and shared. In this study, the framework of the IFC server using ORDB and IDM and the method to develop it will be examined.

As the demand for a convergence between construction technologies and IT is on the rise, as seen in the visualization of U-City construction, studies on the ways in which IT in should be utilized in the building and construction field have been continuously and actively performed. However, there has been almost no development of standardized technology criteria relating to the life cycle of a building (planning, design, construction, and maintenance). That is, there are almost no examples of efforts made to combine construction technology and IT in a fundamental way, considering the environment, the facility, its spatial characteristics, engineering, materials, and structure, aspects that are commonly required not only for interior spaces but also for exterior construction of U-City. Despite the fact that a state-of-the-art infrastructure has been built, and the competency of users with the cutting-edge technology, composite studies on technologies, facilities, services and spaces are still lacking, and basic research on the composite operation method including compatibility and linkage between facilities and services within a U-City has been insufficient as well. It is generally known that by fusing IT with construction technologies, the total period of construction taken can be reduced and construction expenses can be curtailed, while construction quality can be improved. For this reason, it is vital to prepare a standardized base to connect cutting-edge IT with the construction technologies. In preparing such a base, the most urgent issue is to develop standardized technology criteria. The ultimate objective of this research is to establish the technological criteria system required to apply construction-IT fused technologies to U-Cities, and to develop the technological criteria for the design, construction and maintenance of the U-Cities. This paper, whose objective is to establish development strategies for construction-IT fused technologies by way of analyzing the criteria for conventional construction projects, the necessity of criteria for construction-IT fused technologies, and the current status of U-Cities' development, is the underlying research for this purpose. The strategies established are expected to be utilized in establishing the system of criteria for construction-IT fused technologies, and to contribute to a knowledge base in the construction-IT field. In addition, based on the strategies established, criteria for construction-IT fused technologies, such as design criteria and construction standards, will be developed, and by applying these criteria and standards, the ultimate objectives of U-Cities, which are the enhancement of urban competitiveness and the satisfaction of residents, will be attained

The object of this research is to develop a simulation system for earthmoving operations in consideration of the impact of congestion in-between equipment and existing traffic flow around the site. The congestion in-between equipment and traffic flow affect work productivity. The conventional discrete event simulation, however, has limitations in simulating the flow of construction equipment. To consider the impact of congestion in-between equipment and existing traffic flow, in this paper, a multi-agent based simulation model that can realize characteristics of truck behavior more accurately to consider the impact of congestion was proposed. In this simulation model, multiple agents can identify environmental changes and adapt themselves to the new environment. This modeling approach is a better choice for this problem since it describes behavioral characteristics of each agent by sensing changes in dynamic surroundings. This study suggests a detailed system design of the multi-agent based simulation system.

The building construction projects include a variety of risk factors due to uncertainties. To succeed in the projects, it is important how risks are managed. Risk management is composed of identification, analysis and response. Especially, the risk analysis is important to objectively calculate significance of risk factors. This paper evaluates a method to find priorities of risks using the AHP(Analytic Hierarchy Process). The method has some defects; (1) the consistency becomes weak as the number of pair-wise compared risks is large, and (2) the input and output procedures are complex when risks are added to or removed from a risk database. Thus the paper adopt the PROMETHEE(Preference Ranking Organization METHod Enrichment Evaluations) analysis process which is able to overcome the limitation of the AHP restricted to 9 risk factors. The PROMETHEE method makes the procedure of risk analysis simple, when the risk factors pull out and put in the risk database. The purpose of this study is to prove the possibility of the PROMETHEE analysis process by being compared with AHP.

Reinforcing steel works should be carefully controlled by the construction manager considering the severe fluctuation of the price of reinforcing steel bars and for the safety of structure in building constructions. In particular, preparing rebar placing drawings needs more effort and time than before because of the emergence of higher and more complicated buildings. Moreover, the experience of field engineers or foremen (fabricators or detailers) in preparing placing drawings gives rise to the differences in fabricated bar type and quantity of bars used. To address these problems, this study proposed the support system in preparing placing drawings for reinforcing steel works efficiency. In the near future, if this system can be made available on the web, multiple end-users will be able to share the result; the efficiency of rebar supply chain management will also be improved.

U-City related researches and development have been actively conducted in Korea since 2002. According to the Act on Ubiquitous City Construction, "U-City" is defined as "the city to provide ubiquitous service anytime anywhere through the existing ubiquitous backbone systems and ubiquitous technologies, ultimately for the purpose of improving urban competitiveness and quality of life. This research explains the plan to develop collective management technology for integrated operation of U-Space which makes up U-City. Specifically, this report is intended to suggest basic approach of identifying collective management elements of each U-Space type, developing integrated management system and creating interface module to link the system with urban integrated operation center.

As information technologies in construction field get developed, various studies and projects are in progress for improvement of construction industry. Meanwhile, web-basis online system for building materials is tending upward. However, most of the informations about classification system for building materials and specifications are not systematic yet. Most field staffs have some troubles in making full use of the material information, repeating inefficient works from constructional design to the maintenance of it. This study designed auto-categorization system classified by materials, multi-search engines, auto-converting/creating electronic catalog as well as RFID search support to provide standardized building materials information.

In March 2007, Korea's Ministry of Construction & Transportation (MOCT) established "Guidelines on the Computerization and Use of Geotechnical Investigation Results," which took effect as official instructions. The 2007 Geotechnical Information DB Construction Project is underway as a model project for a stable geotechnical information distribution system based on the MOCT guidelines, accompanied by user education on the geotechnical data distribution system. This study introduces a geotechnical data entry system characterized by the standardization of the geotechnical investigation form, the standardization of metadata for creating the geotechnical data to be distributed, and the creation of borehole space data based on the world geodetic system according to the changes in the national coordinate system, to define a unified DB structure and the items for the geotechnical data entry system and to computerize the field geotechnical investigation results using the MOCT guidelines. In addition, the present operating status of the geotechnical data entry system and entry data processing statistics are introduced through an analysis of the model project, and the problems of the project are analyzed to suggest improvements. Education on, and the implementation of, the model project for the geotechnical data entry system, which was developed via the standardization of the geotechnical investigation results form and the metadata for institutions showed that most users can use the system easily. There were problems, however, including those related to the complexity of metadata creation, partial errors in moving to the borehole data window, partial recognition errors in the installation program for different computer operating systems, etc. Especially, the individual standard form usage and the specificity of the person who enters the geotechnical information for the Korea National Housing Corporation, among the institutions under MOCT, required partial improvement of the geotechnical data entry system. The problems surfaced from this study will be promptly addressed in the operation and management of the geotechnical data DB center in 2008.

The Ministry of Construction and Transportation (MOCT) has been constructing a nationwide soil information DB since 2000, as basic data for the construction of 'underground geographical information,' a project under the 2nd National Geo-spatial Information System (NGIS) master plan. The inputted soil information includes not only underground conditions such as the layer depth, type, color, and groundwater level, but also engineering information that can be applied to construction work design, such as on the standard penetration test and the compression test. It is difficult to use this information in soil analysis and design, however, because only the test results are currently available. A web-based geo-spatial information system was developed in this study to facilitate the effective application of the soil information database (DB). First, the space information, layer information, and engineering test information were loaded from the soil information DB in real time, and the earth volume, bearing capacity, and settlement were calculated to develop a web client that will evaluate the ground softness and liquefaction. It seems that the soil information DB can be actively applied to the planning and design of construction works using this system.

These days, the extension and complication of construction project has attached greater significance to IT system for effective project management. Construction companies inside the country have established IT system, but the fact is that they are not up to the expectations of investment provision, and the absense of objective and strategy about project management information system makes its efficiency doubtful. The research, from the point view of construction company, makes an estimate of indefinite future, and presents the process of making out IT system roadmap as a long-term strategy in building IT system.

A city development has been focused on solving a housing shortage of city resulted from rapid industrialization and population increase in city. However, such a development has caused many problems in environment, economy, safety, and so on. In recent, therefore, a new paradigm of a city development is required, and thus ubiquitous city (U-City) concept appears. U-City development, which combines construction method and IT technique, creates a new composite space, and help people improve quality of life in terms of solving many problems caused by existing method of a city development. However, there is no guide to build U-City up to date, and most present U-City projects have processed following past method of city development. Therefore, an objective of this paper is to suggest an explicit procedure of enforcement design in U-City system.

International construction projects typically manifest difficult, complex, and varied types of risk exposures; because of this, there is a need for accurate evaluation of risk-integrated performances during the timeframe of project execution. Given the financial crisis currently affecting the world economy recession, risk management has become a more crucial part for the success of international project management. However, the majority of risk management approaches, particularly for overseas projects, are focused primarily on simple forms of checklists, formalization of risk variables affecting project performance for a specific phase, or more complicated computational methods that restricting practical utilization in real-world projects; moreover, these methods lack the conceptual basis to broadly visualize the level of risk over all phases of a project. This study suggests an efficient, yet simple risk-integrated total index to successfully assess the risk levels of overseas construction projects. To this end, this paper first investigates the life cycles and key processes of decision-making for a given project and then derives formulas to represent the total risk index (TRI) along the key decision-making processes. In addition, the study examines the relationships between TRI and performance levels based on the analysis of 126 real-world project samples. Validations using the proposed TRI showed a high correlation to project performance, signifying the usefulness of the proposed approach for construction firms when investigating the level of risks and key areas for management focus.

Quantity Surveying Profession is a new breed with a history of only less than seven years in S. Korea' s Construction Industry. In this paper, the research aims to investigate the background of the market entrance of this profession in Korean Construction Industry, and the current market direction and future market demands. The research concludes that climate changes in Real Estate markets in relation to Project Financing practices caused by economic crisis of late 1997's, enabled the UK originated QSP sustainable in S. Korea. Moreover it was pointed out that the services of QSP current available in S. Korea's market attributed the different aspect compared to traditional quantity surveying services prevailed in UK. Finally it was apparent that the evolutional direction of the future quantity surveying market in S. Korea is most likely toward multidisciplinary skilled services profession processing not only broader architectural knowledges but cost consciousness, specialty in construction costs and construction contract aspects and transparency in ethical manner.

Green growth is summarized as the national growth strategies to enhance the quality of life as a whole by converting not only the lifestyle but the economic and industrial structures into the low carbon and eco-friendly environments with the green growth industries with low carbon as the momentum for new growth, based on green technologies including renewable energy technologies, energy and resource efficient technologies, converging technologies related to technologies to reduce the environmental pollution. Roles of the construction industry along with other industries are very important in securing justifications for the cooperation between our government and industries for challenges to this green growth as well. The national effects of economy are very large from leading the construction industry to the green construction from the national level. Accordingly, this study suggested responsive plans for both government and companies for the activation of green construction by selecting 15 frontier green construction products and analyzing them by the type of strategy in Korea, as well as analyzing recent trends of overseas green construction.

Best value is the ultimate goal of the owner and can thus have diverse meanings according to the project characteristic, owner's purpose, user groups' payment capability, etc.. Recently, resettlement problems of the marginalized members in the urban regeneration area have been issued in Korea because they have no capability to purchase (or lease) redeveloped housing (or apartment). It means that a minimized production cost for reducing supply price of housing is a key factor in establishing the best value of the marginalized members. The lowest-price bidding system serves the purpose of ensuring a minimized production cost, but due to the low-cost investments, it creates various problems, such as sloppy construction, lowered quality, an increased LCC, and worsening profitability for builders. Thus, to help them resettle, it is necessary to supply affordable housing geared towards a certain appropriate quality and minimum construction costs. Towards this end, this study aimed to propose a cost reduction bidding system based on a technical proposal. The proposed technical-proposal-based cost reduction bidding system consists of the following components: work-unit-based, project-unit-based, and construction-period-reducing technical proposals. These components are evaluated to select the best bidder for a given project. The technical proposal based cost reduction bidding system proposed herein is expected to provide facilities with appropriate supply prices and appropriate quality levels, to bolster the technological competitiveness of builders.

Clients demands have been changed by construction circumstances such as high-technology, megaprojects, and the complexity of construction. Advanced foreign nations have already introduced and applied new project delivery systems (i.e, CM, DB, etc.) to deal with the change of such that. Korea has also promoted variation of the delivery systems for the progressive measure to the rapid changeable situation. Even though government has made his efforts as stated above, some clients have uniformly used those to public construction projects. That is because there are not selection criteria of project delivery system for clients. Therefore, this study presented the selection criteria of project delivery system based on project types in the public large construction projects. In addition, the study has verified the viability of the presented models through consultation with professionals and experts.

This study is designed to examine the current status of the performance warranty systems for asphalt pavements implemented in Europe, USA, and Japan, and to review the feasibility and possibility of introducing this system into the Korean environment. For such objectives, the concept and necessity of performance warranty and the status of Korean contracting systems and overseas performance warranty systems were evaluated. In particular, the bidding systems, performance guarantee systems, and maintenance work inclusion status in the projects and warranty specifications of Europe, USA and Japan were comparatively evaluated. And methods of introducing the performance warranty system by utilizing defects liability system and design-build contracts of Korea were suggested.

It is very important for performance of information system that we make an effort to raise user's satisfaction by continuously grasping user's requirement by evaluation of PMIS based on ASP service quality and reflecting this to information system. However, It is lack that developments of suitable evaluation index of PMIS based on ASP service quality. Hereupon, In this study, we propose the evaluation indicators. First, The evaluation area is classified by form the foundation of D & M IS Success Model (2003); system quality, information quality, service quality. Second, The detail evaluation item which include considerations which are gotten through investigation of the construction industry and PMIS based on ASP is grouping by form the foundation SERVQUAL which is a service quality evaluation tool proposed PZB(1988). It is suitable to evaluate PMIS based on ASP service quality in construction industry and able to evaluate various aspects.

Construction projects are vulnerable to diverse internal and external factors, requiring systematic and consistent performance management along the entire life cycle of a project. In particular, urban renewal projects have a range of performance measures, including policy reconciliation and permits, project development, project financing, design, construction, and occupancy and maintenance. This requires a program-level megaproject approach, which integrates each stage of a project as well as variety of stakeholders' interests in pursuing a project from different perspectives. However, previous research on performance management has focused especially on the limited scopes of factors, including cost, quality, and schedule at the project level or on financial factors at the firm level. Given the lack of current approaches, this study suggests an integrated and systematic performance management scheme to control urban renewal megaprojects at the broadened perspectives of the program level. To this end, this study adopts the balanced scorecard approach and elicits key performance indices associated with various project configurations. Finally, an algorithm is presented for quantitatively assessing the level of performances along whole life cycle of urban renewal megaprojects.

Efficient communication of construction information has been critical for successful project performance. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has appeared as a tool for efficient communication. Through 3D CAD objects, it is possible to check interception and collisions of each object in advance. In addition, 4D simulation based on 3D objects integrated with time information makes it realize to go over scheduling and to perceive potential errors in scheduling. However, current scheduling simulation is still at a stage of animation due to manual integration of 3D objects and scheduling data. Accordingly, this study aims to develop an integrated model of 3D CAD objects that automatically creates scheduling information.

The cooperation and trust among the project participants play a critical role in the success or failure of any delivery system in construction industry. But it is very difficult to establish trust between an owner and a contractor when rational people only pursue only their own material self-interest. Based on the principal-agent theory, this paper will introduce the altruistic behavior into the traditional principal-agent model, and model the reciprocal behavior between the owner and contractor. We will show that both the owner and the contractor benefit from their reciprocal behavior, and hence trust establishing between them is possible. More importantly, we will proof that the higher the project uncertainty is, the more important trust establishing is.

It is commonly recognized to need performance management for successful construction project. PPC measurement of Last Planner System is one of construction project measurement method. PPC measurement is quantitatively assessment to go through construction, and that is not completely to be trusted when compare a project with another or an individual case work with another in same project. According to, purpose of this study is comparison indicator establishment that compare project with another or an individual case work with another it is not use PPC measurement for quantitatively assessment to go through construction. The procedure of this study is derive of the point at issue of existing PPC measurement for a aim PPC measurement in this study expenditure and select weight about that and it is applied to actually construction.

This paper discusses cases of infrastructure asset management in the U.S., Canada, and Australia and investigates infrastructure management in Korea in order to set the direction for the asset management improvement. The definitions of infrastructure asset management from various entities are introduced and implementation framework and organizational structures are described. The investigation on Korean public asset management practices finds the strong and weak points and defines the requirements and considerations to further improve the current practices. This paper will assist adopting infrastructure asset management in Korea and provide guide for the infrastructure maintenance.

Because of the development of advanced construction technology, the inner environments of building become more and more complicated, which may result in many problems. The administer may forget where they put up the certain picture, and search for it all over the building, or they underestimate the number of the visitors, and find the situation is out of control, while the pedestrian may get lost, and after making their efforts, they found they turned back to the origin point again. So it is very necessary to establish an indoor spatial database. On one hand, it is able to assist administrator to manage the property and human flow inside the building, on the other hand it could help the pedestrian find the way easily especially when they are not familiar with the building or there is an emergency. This paper focused on how to create the indoor spatial database including both static database and moving objects database. The static database is built on the basis of 3D building models, and the moving objects database gets information from many kinds of cameras and sensors installed in the building. And at the same time the paper discussed the practical use of indoor spatial database mainly in three aspects including consistency management, building restructure, and pedestrian navigation.

Due to the construction union's inefficient manner of carrying out their construction projects, lot's of conflicts and arguments among the union members are happening, so the proper model of reconstruction and process at each level of projects are also being recognized as an important part of the industry. So I would like to present an ideal process model of home reconstruction industry. Here below I'm presenting the benefits of this model when its applied properly. Through the study of information gained from the survey of residents, benefits such as AHP, analysis of SPSS, reduced construction time, budget cut, etc. will be produced

The paradigm of urban generation does not lie in physical development/maintenance such as urban redevelopment any more. The paradigm is shifting to balanced activation of administration / management functions including central commerce/business functions, broad culture/tourism functions, international functions and adequate level of residence functions. The urban regeneration project aims to restore functions of cities by physical/environmental, living/cultural and industrial/economical regeneration and is managed differently from existing projects in that it includes multiple sub-projects in it. The overall projects management should be by managing the value sought by the urban regeneration project and multiple other sub-projects. The objective of this study is to present various methods of value management in order to avoid conflicts between various objectives within the said project. It aims to provide the value management methods for decision making by understanding correlatedness between values of various projects and prioritizing them.

CII BM&M(Benchmarking & Metrics) in USA and DTI(Department of Trade and Industry) in UK have built up systems that enable performance measuring and made the results of performance measurement comparable between projects to utilize them as benchmarking tools. By comparing the results of performance measurement, it is possible to grasp the success level of project management and to establish the direction of management. However, construction projects are much diversified and even those projects with the same work type have different attributes. Therefore, simply comparing the results of project performance measurement without considering the characteristics of projects is not justifiable and affects the reliability of the benchmarking results. Therefore, to solve this problem, this study presents a methodology that makes it possible to compare the individual construction projects considering various characteristics. The benefits and importance of project characteristics to overall project performance will be quantitatively expressed and they will be reflected on the results of performance management. By maximally converting multiple projects with different characteristics into the same projects through a new methodology to convert different projects into the same level utilizing such utility-bases and comparing the performances of those projects, project performance results can be utilized in project management as a tool for more accurate decision making and as a robust benchmarking tool.

Objective of Urban regeneration project is a recovery of urban utilities through a physical, environmental, cultural, industrial and economic regeneration. The current paradigm of urban regeneration is not a simple redevelopment as physical redevelopment or improvement. Urban regeneration project is an overall development including a central commercial capacity and business capacity for administration and management, cultural facilities, sightseeing, a residential area. So Urban regeneration project include a various project. Project management of Urban Regeneration project is widely different with general project management. For that purpose, this research would offer to contribute the success factors of urban regeneration project for successful project. For offering these, this research analyzed the properties of urban regeneration project and success factors of construction project by reviewing a literature. The principal characteristics are variety objectives of each district of urban regeneration project, a diversity of stakeholder's objectives and complex structure of stakeholders, an unstructured decision-making system, a lack of plan for business cooperation. We abstracted factors for urban regeneration from brainstorming and verification by experienced experts. We suggest 2 factors related to achieving a goal effectively and 10 factors related to progress of urban regeneration project efficiently.

Construction project is necessary element for human life to upgrade the quality and convenience. However, due to its contradictory nature to the environment conservation, environmental pollution and damage, deterioration of natural scenery, noise/vibration, water quality pollution, etc. caused in the process of construction greatly affect the environment. The purpose of this study is to propose checklist for environment management can be used in construction phase. For this, we went ahead with the research by studying the existing research related to environment-friendly construction project management both at home and abroad, investigation and analysis of environment-related laws and ordinances, and drawing the checklists for natural environment and living environment at the construction phase. As a result, we were able to compile a checklist for nine items including geological features, animals and plants, use of soil, quality of air, water, and soil, construction wastes, noise, vibration, recreation, and sceneries. The checklist is structured in 4 grades and coded so as to allow it to be developed with the use of computer system in future. We hope that the checklist presented in this study will help lead the managers at the construction phase in construction development sustainable from the perspective of environmental conservation.

Infrastructure is provided to the user through long-term project period and large-scale working expenses. Existing facilities are getting old as time goes by. Accordingly, proper maintenance is required and generally more maintenance cost than initial invested cost is needed during life cycle. Therefore, a specific plan that just increases the value of facilities is required by evaluating performance of facilities and inputting minimum maintenance cost. Value engineering that increases the value of object by systemically analyzing Life Cycle Costs and function is actively promoted at the design phase of construction. These efforts can increase the performance of facilities at the maintenance phase of infrastructure. This study is to search how to evaluate the performance of Roadway by utilizing function analysis, as a core part of VE in the maintenance phase. In order to this a new evaluation criteria were proposed by adding an evaluation items to the existing criteria through the research of old documents, status of roadway maintenance and function analysis of VE. The results of this study may promote the effective performance evaluation to determine a resolution of roadway congestion in future. A succeeding study using the proposed evaluation criteria will be required.

During the last ten years, there have been many studies related with settlement and reinvigoration of CM. These researches have shown that the application of CM has been not reinvigorated in Korean construction industry yet, because of some problems such as the insufficient application of the public sector, the policy matters and the CM fee estimates. But the present condition data of the Korean CM Market shown in these studies was insufficient for the standpoint of Market itself. Also, some of these studies compared the Korean CM Market with The America CM Market, to study the foreign CM markets. However, because the Korea CM Market only has the CM for Fee Market but the American CM Market has the CM for Fee and the CM at Risk, the Korea CM Market must be not only compared with the America CM Market but also compared with the America CM for Fee Market. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine the present condition of the Korea CM Market through the compare and contrast of the Korean CM Market, American CM Market and American CM for Fee Market, by the Market Growth rate and Market Share. This study further aims to verify whether Korean CM market was implemented.

Steel frame factories were surveyed in this study in order to explore the possibility of shortening the construction time and save on construction cost through overlapping at the stages of design or construction. In the survey, construction professionals were interviewed in order to collect quantitative data. Hypotheses were then formulated, and the data was thereby analyzed using the simulation technique in order to analyze the effects of the concurrent engineering method on shorter construction time and cost saving. In addition, actual cases were analyzed to determine the overlapping rates of major processes in terms of shorter construction time and cost saving and to analyze the relationship between time and cost due to overlapping.

In the construction industry, IT has been an alternative for the enhancement of productivity and technical advances through a paradigm shift. While it has been recognized that the IT system will have a substantial influence on the industry, a quantitative valuation has been very limited. This paper has chosen EVMS (Earned Value Management System), which supports the integrated management of cost and schedule by utilizing IT tools, and which is the largest trend in the construction IT industry in Korea, in order to suggest an analysis model for the valuation of IT. The CVM (Contingent Valuation Method) is used to quantitatively measure intangible value of IT application. Then, a valuation and analysis model were suggested for the quantitative valuation of the effect of IT adoption. In terms of willingness to pay for EVMS, the expected benefits from the adoption of EVMS were US$ 584.52 per man annually. This research should be helpful for construction companies evaluating their investment to Project Management Information System.

Give high priority to the technologies that can be directly applicable to the U-City development projects which are in progress by many central and local governments. Create a real world product at the end of R&D phase by testing prototypes in test-beds or test-labs. Recently, new construction technologies have been developed, but they are rarely being applied to the construction filed. In this paper, the basic design was examined so that various technologies can be selected through a test-bed, analyzed for the real situation, and applied to actual construction sites. Improve productivity of regional and urban construction exercises and improve competitiveness of related products and services using IT-based telemetering/GIS technology.

Despite the serious lack of parking lots, studies on parking lot expansion are insufficient; research on users' satisfaction following parking lot expansion is practically nonexistent. Therefore, this study sought to provide basic data for the parking lot expansion of old apartments by comparatively analyzing users' satisfaction before and after the parking lot expansion through a questionnaire survey that targeted residents benefiting from the expanded parking lot. Results revealed a low post-occupancy satisfaction with the parking lot expansion despite the parking lot expansion and improvement of the parking lot environment. This was because the parking lot was not expanded up to the second basement floor due to the lack of appropriate parking space. Other factors included the construction cost burden and lack of connectivity of the basement parking lot with elevators. The results actually raise the need for the establishment of an optimally suitable expansion plan and development of method and technology requiring lower cost and shorter construction period in the design and construction processes for parking lot expansion. Through post-occupancy evaluation (POE) after parking lot expansion, this study quantitatively identified the problems associated with the parking lots of old apartments and ensuing expansion effects. The findings in this study can be used as basic data to seek a suitable diagnosis and evaluation method for the parking lots of old apartments.

Project managers play a key role in cost, time, and quality of a project. Selection of an appropriate project manager, therefore, is considered as one of the most important decisions in any construction project. It should be noted that most important decision makings are carried out by the project manager throughout the project. Traditionally, project manager selection in construction companies in Iran is through organizing an interview with candidates and selecting the most appropriate choice in accordance with the capabilities, potentials and individual specifications coupled with the requirements of the project. In the same direction, organizing interview on selection of appropriate candidate is usually carried out by senior managers of companies. Determination of the most important criteria for selection of project managers and also identification of significance coefficient of each criterion can highly help senior managers of companies to make sound selection decisions. In this paper, a numerical model has been considered for determination of significance of each criterion, details of which are submitted for selection of project manager in Iranian petrochemical, oil and gas sector companies. For this reason, all criteria- considered by senior managers of the companies under study- are first determined. Then, information obtained through 38 interviews, conducted by senior managers of the mentioned companies while selecting project manager, is analyzed. Significant coefficient of each criterion is calculated through the accumulated data using fuzzy curves method.

The purpose of this research is to propose the conceptual model of Scenario-based Project Planning Expert System which has not been used in domestic LNG plant industry. This research examines data on the plant project planning expert system of domestic and oversea, analyzes the components of project planning expert systems and benchmark excellent cases. The conceptual model of LNG plant project planning expert system is established through the procedure as has been noted above. The results of this research are as follows: First, this research draws out such components of LNG plant project planning expert system as feasibility, cost control, contract management and risk management. Second, this research proposes the conceptual model of LNG plant project planning expert system which core module is consist of feasibility evaluation, life cycle cost evaluation and decision making. Finally, each module of LNG plant project planning expert system would be integrated into the Scenario-based Project Planning Expert System.

The purpose of this study is to provide the problems of insurance system of maritime facilities(Gas Plant) in korea. In order to find out the problems of insurance system of construction work, the literature research and case study on the maritime facility construction are adopted as research method. And this study analyzed the construction cases of maritime facilities(Gas Plant) to which the national contract law was applied for the first time. The findings of this study are as follows: In the case analysis of 00 facility construction, the contractor pay additional insurance fees for the construction. And the regulations on insurance registration are not stated clearly relating to the enforcement ordinance of the national contract law.

In 2006, Korean Government decided to relocate the several Government bodies and public institutes. They include total of 49 central Government agencies, semi-government agencies, and 17 national research institutes. The completion of the relocation program has been set to be final in 2030. The target population for the city plan is set to be 500,000. The goal of MAC is first to complete the first phase of the program by 2014 within the budget. In order to achieve the goal, considerable time has been spent to properly establish the program management system. The success of MAC's Multi-function Program Administration System is too early to determine as it is still in progressive. The success depends on the operations not the development.

Recently, the researches on the urban regeneration projects have been performed very actively. It is a part of the effort that solves some social and economical problems occurred by deteriorated buildings and degraded infrastructures through new urban regeneration projects or redevelopment projects. However, the urban regeneration projects show the characteristics that can not guarantee in the project performance because the projects have various and complex stakeholders related to these projects and are exposed to lots of risks due to its huge scale. This study proposed the risk performance index method to improve the efficiency of the overall performance measurement for a mega-project by extending from the traditional cost/schedule based performance measurement system. The risk performance index method proposed in this study has a similar system to the EVMS, and makes possible to perform a three dimensional integrated performance measurement in cost/schedule/risk through 18 different indexes that compose the risk performance index.

In order to deal with severe competition in the construction market of developing countries, large contractors must continually improve their own performance and operation. Performance measurement is the heart of ceaseless improvement in organizations. Key performance indicators (KPIs) play a key role in measuring project management performance (PMP) of large contractors in developing countries. The main objective of this paper is to identify KPIs, which can be used to measure PMP of contractors, and then analyze the underlying relationships of these KPIs in order to gain insight into PMP of large construction firms in Vietnam construction industry (VCI). Literature reviews and the pilot survey provided 30 KPIs. Fourteen KPIs, which have the mean values higher than 3.0, were considered as important KPIs through a questionnaire survey of 32 professionals. Factor analysis of these KPIs was employed to categorize them. The results of the survey revealed that top six KPIs are construction time and cost, owner satisfaction on services and products, and quality management and project team performance. Factor analysis uncovered that 14 top-ranked KPIs can be grouped under six categories, namely: (1) construction input management, (2) owner satisfaction, (3) cost and quality, (4) manpower management, (5) subcontractor performance and (6) equipment management. The findings of this research can be used as a guideline to measure PMP of contractors in Vietnam as well as in other developing countries. Since contractors from a country to the other country may have the same manner to manage construction projects, the results of this study may be useful not only to practitioners and researchers in Vietnam but also to participants in other developing countries.

In recent days, the study of urban regeneration has been conducting with purposeful and sincere intent starting out with the residential environment improvement works. Within the range of urban regeneration, the low-cost housing technology means development of totally-integrated housing technology that may be applied to the regeneration project, especially for the rundown areas where infrastructure facilities in the urban zone have been degraded and obsoleted. In line with this, among many and varied methods in order for realization of the low-cost housing as a part of urban regeneration project, this study should like to propose an improvement methods of the key technologies in relation to the construction works by type of work with which construction costs (directing cost) would be reduced. And, in order to elicit the method for element technology that has been developed and improved in the most optimal manner centering on the selected construction work by the type of work, the researcher conducted comparative review of summary of element technologies related to the construction works concerned, characteristics, and construction method thereof. In particular, the researcher investigated the expenses (construction cost and labor cost), constructions (contractibility and productivity), safety, quality of works, and the technical status in environmental aspects, and the researcher also conducted analyses and evaluations thereof.

The water resources project of 320 Ha second stage reclamation, in which including an University City, out of 800 Ha Ndata Farm, Malawa, had been under studied in this research. The challenge of C value of runoff coefficient was obtained as 0.8, by introducing the attenuation factors method, proposed by second author, an IDF dimensionless method customary used in Taiwan, proposed by the third author, is translated further to solve the project design rainfall; Rational Method, thus, obtains 11.5 CMS as the 5 year recurrence storage. The final job, completed by the third author's on-site performance, includs field alignments and discussions with the trustee, Malawa President H. E. Dr. Bingu Wa Mutharika, when a special concern of anti-theft. In order to provide sufficient supply up to an amount of 44,000 M3 during April to November, the sketch package includes 6 measurements: one water barrage, one sluice gate, one intake, one sediment reservoir, one water reservoir, and 3199 Km long gravity-driving hydraulic pipe.

Since various methods for repairing and rehabilitating have been applied to damaged bridges to increase their load carrying capacity, many researches on the methods have been widely carried out. In particular, In terms of applicability, strengthening efficiency and economical efficiency, external tendons using lifting hole anchorage system is the most effective method among the aforementioned methods. In order to verify the strengthening effectiveness, flexural experiments on the beams strengthened with external tendons using lifting hole anchorage system were carried out. The experiments were conducted on two groups of systems, the existing and the proposed external tendons using lifting hole anchorage system. In addition, An evaluation on ductility of the beams were conducted in this paper.

The new paradigm called 'Low Carbon Green Growth' involved in reducing greenhouse gas is on the rise as a critical issue worldwide. The essential of Kyoto protocol issued in 1997 is to achieve the sustainable economic growth environments by converting existing production system to eco-friendly one. The protocol imposes the liability to reduce greenhouse gas to the countries joined to it. The paradigm is directly involved in the energy consumption and environmental pollution caused by construction activities. Value Engineering which are mainly applied in the design phase in practice is a measure to improve the value of a constructed facility by analyzing and/or appraising the functions and costs of it. However, an appropriate method which assesses eco-friendliness of constructed facility has not been propose by researchers. This paper proposes a method which assesses the performance involved in eco-friendliness of constructed facility using Value Engineering (VE) in the design phase. The method estimates the environmental cost relative to the amounts of energy consumption and environmental pollution occurred over the entire project life cycle. The database called "Life Cycle Inventory DB", which stores information about the amounts of environmental pollution, is used. The algorithm which retrieves the amounts of environmental pollutions from the DB and converts them into environmental costs is developed. The algorithm is implemented into a system which quantifies the eco-friendliness of constructed facility in the design phase using VE.

Nine alkali-activated (AA) mortars were mixed and cured at water or air-dried conditions to explore the significance and limitation for the application of the combination of Ba and Ca ions as an alkali-activator. Ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS) was used for source materials, and calcium hydroxide (Ca(OH)₂) and barium hydroxide (Ba(OH)₂) were employed as alkali activators. Test results clearly showed that the water curing condition was more effective than the air-dried curing condition for the formation of the denser calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H) gels that had a higher molar Si/Ca ratio, resulting in a higher strength development. At the same time, the introduction of Ba(OH)₂ led to the formation of 2CaO·Al₂O₃·SiO₂·8H₂O (C₂ASH₈) hydrates with higher molar Si/Al and Ca/Al ratios. Based on the test results, it can be concluded that the developed cementless mortars have highly effective performance and high potential as an eco-friendly sustainable building material.

This study evaluates the energy performance of super high-rise residential buildings with e-QUEST simulation and calculates the annual cooling and heating load. The result of this study have concluded that the most influential factor is the characteristics of the window and also suggest the most efficient window system from the result of calculation of different glasses' cooling and heating load. The result of this study shows that The most efficient method to enhance the energy performance is to use low reflective 3 pairs Low-E glass and Low-E coating(inside of outer glass) pair glass.