• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.33 no.6
• /
• pp.2529-2539
• /
• 2013

The Korean construction industry has led the miraculous economic boost of Korea by providing solid domestic infrastructures such as highway, roads, and airports. It also played a critical role in global construction market and eaned more than 500 billions dollars in terms of their accumulated international orders. However, domestic construction market has significantly decreased in recent years due to the domestic political environments and global economic crisis. Therefore, the importance of international construction market cannot be more emphasized to the Korean construction market in order for the sustainable growth. There has been, however, little research in the area of identifying required competency elements for the Korean construction industry to stay successful in the global market. The main purpose of this study is to identify elements of core competency to increase global competitiveness for Korean construction industry. Core global construction competency elements were derived from the internal and external environmental analyses along with the extensive literature review, expert interviews and a survey. This study utilized the Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) and a gap analysis in providing insights on the status competitiveness of the Korean construction industry in terms of required global core competency elements. The analysis shows that project management and financial management are the main areas for improvements required to engineering contractors while construction contractors need to take a more balanced approach among technical, project management, and financial management in order to increase their global competencies.

• Journal of Wetlands Research
• /
• v.15 no.4
• /
• pp.535-541
• /
• 2013

The urbanization affects significantly on a natural water circulation system by increasing the imperviousness rate. It is also negatively affecting on urban temperature, environmental pollution, water quality, and aqua-ecosystems. The Korea MOE (Ministry of Environment) adapted a new environmental policy in order to reduce the impact of urbanization, which is the Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) program. The GSI can be achieved by protecting conservable green spaces, enlarging more green spaces, and constructing more permeable pavements. The GSI is including many different techniques such as bioretention, rain garden, infiltration trench and so on. Also It is the infrastructures using natural mechanisms of soils, microorganisms, plants and animals on a water circulation system and pollutant reduction. In this research, a multi functional GSI technology with infiltration-filtration mechanisms has been developed and performed lab-scale tests to evaluate the performances about infiltration rate restoration and pollutant reduction. The most of pollutants including metals, organics and particulates were reduced about 50~90% due to water infiltration and storage functions. The clogging was found when the TSS loading rate was reached on $8.3{\sim}9.0kg/m^2$, which value is higher than the values in literatures. It means the new technology can show high performances with low maintenances.