• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.107-116
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• 2019

Korean construction engineering firms want to pave the way for expansion of overseas markets through the World Bank's Official Development Assistance (ODA) projects as a way to improve their overseas project performance. However, since the World Bank project competes with global companies for limited projects, building partnerships with suitable business partners is essential to gain an upper hand in bidding competition and meet the institutional conditions of the recipient country. In this regard, many network studies have been conducted in the past through Social Network Analysis (SNA), but few have been analyzed based on the process of changes in the network. So, This study collected winning data from the three Southeast Asian countries that ended after the World Bank's ODA project performed smoothly, and established a learning-based link prediction model that reflected the dynamic nature of the network. As a result, the 11 main variables acting on building a cooperative relationship between winning companies were derived and the effect of each variables on the probability value of cooperation between individual links was identified.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.5D
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• pp.695-703
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• 2008

China water market has huge potential for increased use of BOT mode and one of the most attractive markets of doing business. However, the current China water BOT market shows that many foreign companies are retreating from the market while Chinese water companies fast growing. From the view no domestic companies have track records in China BOT water market, the research identified twenty market access barriers in terms of construction laws, regulations, BOT-related policy and the recent market situation. These are evaluated based on interview results with 10 professionals direct or indirect having a China water BOT experience. All the factors are found to be highly influential to foreign company's decision on the market participation. Among those, no fixed return policy and low water price, difficulty in water price adjustment and approval, and no government guarantees, all directly related to the project viability and under the control of government, were the most critical factors, implying government's role is the key in increasing the market competition by attracting more foreign participation on the market. In addition, new construction law regulating foreign EPC contractor's construction work, namely Decree 113, and requirement of applying competitive bidding in selecting EPC contractor in a BOT project are also considered signigicant barriers on foreign participation, which contradicts international norm and therefore necessitates an adjustment on current decision process in domestic companies.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.57-66
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• 2017

Using bidding data collected from the World Bank's open database, this research performed a series of competitive analyses of the major countries that have participated in the Bank's engineering consulting services contracts in Vietnam. The goal of the analysis was to evaluate the performance of Korean engineering firms to date, and provide strategic recommendations for future projects. Results showed that Korean firms had a high bid acceptance rate, comparable to major developed countries. The success was attributed to the high technical scores in the selection process. Comparatively, financial scores were not competitive and inferior to developing countries such as China and India. Results of a 'Skitmore' analysis revealed that Korea was competitive in medium size projects and were situated between developed and developing countries. Korea thus needs to increase participation in basic and detailed design services, 2) improve labor costs through 'localization' and latest technologies, and 3) and venture into larger sized projects.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.52-62
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• 2023

The objective of this study is to propose an automated algorithm for precise cutting length of slab rebar complying with regulations such as anchorage length, standard hooks, and lapping length. This algorithm aims to improve the traditional manual quantity take-off process typically outsourced by external contractors. By providing accurate rebar quantity data at BBS(Bar Bending Schedule) level from the bidding phase, uncertainty in quantity take-off can be eliminated and reliance on out-sourcing reduced. In addition, the algorithm allows for early determination of precise quantities, enabling construction firms to preapre competitive and optimized bids, leading to increased profit margins during contract negotiations. The proposed algorithm not only streamlines redundant tasks across various processes, including estimating, budgeting, and BBS generation but also offers flexibility in handling post-contract structural drawing changes. In particular, the proposed algorithm, when combined with BIM, can solve the technical problems of using BIM in the early phases of construction, and the algorithm's formulas and shape codes that built as REVIT-based family files, can help saving time and manpower.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.65-78
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• 2011

Construction business, which is complex and long-term business, requires accurate estimation and verification in construction costs and payment procedure from project planning to the completion of construction phase. And more importantly, it is necessary to investigate and determine the risk factors related to construction costs during the entire process including design planning, construction drawings, and quantity calculating. But, currently, it is not seem to be adequate to cope with the risk and increased construction costs against the operational budget in terms of actual costs when screening and estimating the bidding cost of public apartment. Therefore, this study selected and analyzed 40 sites' report of construction completion account from 2004 to 2010 focused on the adequacy on the modification of contract and design planning and on the complication of the budget in the beginning of the project. This study deducted various risk causes and results by analyzing actual costs according to year, architectural area, region, construction cost and sale/lease classification. We could find out construction risk according to annual variation of government policy and economy, and also deducted risk items by construction characteristic according to region and architectural area. Study result, we first found out the problems of lowest price award system according to the construction costs. The weight of the cost increase risk was analyzed that subcontract and material costs are very high. Roof and tile work were analyzed highly in subcontract cost risk and reinforcing bar and cement were analyzed highly in material cost risk, among direct construction cost. Finally, this study results could be used in comparing the categories of the construction costs made by specific construction process, belonging to the construction costs, with the operational budget made in the beginning of the project that can enable to grasp unpredictable risks over the construction costs and making quantitative analysis for it through analyzing the range of fluctuation and variations led by the fluctuations in the actual construction costs.

• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.31
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• pp.27-56
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• 2006

Today's financial institutions usually take environmental issues seriously into consideration as they could not evade lender liability in an increasing number of cases. On the international scene, a brand-new concept of the "Equator Principles" in the New Millenium has driven more and more international banks to adopt these Principles in project financing. Sustainable development has been a key word in understanding new trends of the governments, financial institutions, corporations and civic groups in the 21st century. The Equator Principles are a set of voluntary environmental and social guidelines for sustainable finance. These Principles commit bank officers to avoid financial support to projects that fail to meet these guidelines. The Principles were conceived in 2002 on an initiative of the International Finance Corporation(IFC), and launched in June 2003. Since then, dozens of major banks, accounting for up to 80 percent of project loan market, have adopted the Principles. Accordingly, the Principles have become the de facto standard for all banks and investors on how to deal with potential social and environmental issues of projects to be financed. Compliance with the Equator Principles facilitates for endorsing banks to participate in the syndicated loan and help them to manage the risks associated with large-scale projects. The Equator Principles call for financial institutions to provide loans to projects under the following circumstances: - The risk of the project is categorized in accordance with internal guidelines based upon the environmental and social screening criteria of the IFC. - For Category A and B projects, borrowers or sponsors are required to conduct a Social and Environmental Assessment, the preparation of which must meet certain requirements and satisfactorily address key social and environmental issues. - The Social and Environmental Assessment report should address baseline social and environmental conditions, requirements under host country laws and regulations, sustainable development, and, as appropriate, IFC's Environmental, Health and Safety Guidelines, etc. - Based on the Social and Environmental Assessment, Equator banks then make agreements with borrowers on how they mitigate, monitor and manage the risks through a Social and Environmental Management System. Compliance with the plan is included in the covenant clause of loan agreements. If the borrower doesn't comply with the agreed terms, the bank will take corrective actions. The Equator Principles are not a mere declaration of cautious banks but a full commitment of lenders. A violation of the Principles in the process of project financing, which led to an unexpected damage to the affected community, would not give rise to any specific legal remedies other than ordinary lawsuits. So it is more effective for banks to ensure consistent implementation of the Principles and to have them take responsible measures to solve social and environmental issues. Public interests have recently mounted up with respect to environmental issues on the occasion of the Supreme Court's decision (2006Du330) on the fiercely debated reclamation project at Saemangeum. The majority Justices said that the expected environmental damages like probable pollution of water and soil were not believed so serious and that the Administration should continue to implement the project seeking ways to make it more environment friendly. In this case, though the Category A Saemangeum Project was carried out by a government agency, the Supreme Court behaved itself as a signal giver to approve or stop the environment-related project like an Equator bank in project financing. At present, there is no Equator bank in Korea in contrast to three big banks in Japan. Also Korean contractors, which are aggressively bidding for Category A-type projects in South East Asia and Mideast, might find themselves in a disadvantageous position because they are generally ignorant of the environmental assessment associated with project financing. In this regard, Korean banks and overseas project contractors should care for the revised Equator Principles and the latest developments in project financing more seriously. It's because its scope has expanded to the capital cost of US$10 million or more across all industry sectors regardless of developing countries or not. It should be noted that, for a Korean bank, being an Equator bank is more or less burdensome in a short-term period, but it must be conducive to minimizing risks and building up good reputation in the long run.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.471-480
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• 2023

The Korean construction order volume in South Korea grew significantly from 91.3 trillion won in public orders in 2013 to a total of 212 trillion won in 2021, particularly in the private sector. As the size of the domestic and overseas markets grew, the scale and complexity of EPC (Engineering, Procurement, Construction) projects increased, and risk management of project management and ITB (Invitation to Bid) documents became a critical issue. The time granted to actual construction companies in the bidding process following the EPC project award is not only limited, but also extremely challenging to review all the risk terms in the ITB document due to manpower and cost issues. Previous research attempted to categorize the risk terms in EPC contract documents and detect them based on AI, but there were limitations to practical use due to problems related to data, such as the limit of labeled data utilization and class imbalance. Therefore, this study aims to develop an AI model that can categorize the contract terms based on the FIDIC Yellow 2017(Federation Internationale Des Ingenieurs-Conseils Contract terms) standard in detail, rather than defining and classifying risk terms like previous research. A multi-text classification function is necessary because the contract terms that need to be reviewed in detail may vary depending on the scale and type of the project. To enhance the performance of the multi-text classification model, we developed the ELECTRA PLM (Pre-trained Language Model) capable of efficiently learning the context of text data from the pre-training stage, and conducted a four-step experiment to validate the performance of the model. As a result, the ensemble version of the self-developed ITB-ELECTRA model and Legal-BERT achieved the best performance with a weighted average F1-Score of 76% in the classification of 57 contract terms.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.457-468
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• 2020

Problems arising during pile design works for plant construction, civil and architecture work are mostly come from uncertainty of geotechnical characteristics. In particular, obtaining the N-value measured through the Standard Penetration Test (SPT) is the most important data. However, it is difficult to obtain N-value by drilling investigation throughout the all target area. There are many constraints such as licensing, time, cost, equipment access and residential complaints etc. it is impossible to obtain geotechnical characteristics through drilling investigation within a short bidding period in overseas. The geotechnical characteristics at non-drilling investigation points are usually determined by the engineer's empirical judgment, which can leads to errors in pile design and quantity calculation causing construction delay and cost increase. It would be possible to overcome this problem if N-value could be predicted at the non-drilling investigation points using limited minimum drilling investigation data. This study was conducted to predicted the N-value using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) which one of the Artificial intelligence (AI) method. An Artificial Neural Network treats a limited amount of geotechnical characteristics as a biological logic process, providing more reliable results for input variables. The purpose of this study is to predict N-value at the non-drilling investigation points through patterns which is studied by multi-layer perceptron and error back-propagation algorithms using the minimum geotechnical data. It has been reviewed the reliability of the values that predicted by AI method compared to the measured values, and we were able to confirm the high reliability as a result. To solving geotechnical uncertainty, we will perform sensitivity analysis of input variables to increase learning effect in next steps and it may need some technical update of program. We hope that our study will be helpful to design works in the future.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.34-40
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• 2021

Purpose If a new test is introduced or reagents are changed in the laboratory of a medical institution, the characteristics of the test should be analyzed according to the procedure and the assessment of reagents should be made. However, several necessary conditions must be met to perform all required comparative evaluations, first enough samples should be prepared for each test, and secondly, various reagents applicable to the comparative evaluations must be supplied. Even if enough comparative evaluations have been done, there is a limit to the fact that the data variation for the new reagent represents the overall patient data variation, The fact puts a burden on the laboratory to the change the reagent. Due to these various difficulties, reagent changes in the laboratory are limited. In order to introduce a competitive bid, the institute conducted a full investigation of Radioimmunoassay(RIA) reagents for each test and established the range of reagents available in the laboratory through comparative evaluations. We wanted to share this process. Materials and Methods There are 20 items of tests conducted in our laboratory except for consignment tests. For each test, RIA reagents that can be used were fully investigated with the reference to external quality control report. and the manuals for each reagent were obtained. Each reagent was checked for the manual to check the test method, Incubation time, sample volume needed for the test. After that, the primary selection was made according to whether it was available in this laboratory. The primary selected reagents were supplied with 2kits based on 100tests, and the data correlation test, sensitivity measurement, recovery rate measurement, and dilution test were conducted. The secondary selection was performed according to the results of the comparative evaluation. The reagents that passed the primary and secondary selections were submitted to the competitive bidding list. In the case of reagent is designated as a singular, we submitted a explanatory statement with the data obtained during the primary and secondary selection processes. Results Excluded from the primary selection was the case where TAT was expected to be delayed at the moment, and it was impossible to apply to our equipment due to the large volume of reagents used during the test. In the primary selection, there were five items which only one reagent was available.(squamous cell carcinoma Ag(SCC Ag), β-human chorionic gonadotropin(β-HCG), vitamin B12, folate, free testosterone), two reagents were available(CA19-9, CA125, CA72-4, ferritin, thyroglobulin antibody(TG Ab), microsomal antibody(Mic Ab), thyroid stimulating hormone-receptor-antibody(TSH-R-Ab), calcitonin), three reagents were available (triiodothyronine(T3), Tree T3, Free T4, TSH, intact parathyroid hormone(intact PTH)) and four reagents were available are carcinoembryonic antigen(CEA), TG. In the secondary selection, there were eight items which only one reagent was available.(ferritin, TG, CA19-9, SCC, β-HCG, vitaminB12, folate, free testosterone), two reagents were available(TG Ab, Mic Ab, TSH-R-Ab, CA125, CA72-4, intact PTH, calcitonin), three reagents were available(T3, Tree T3, Free T4, TSH, CEA). Reasons excluded from the secondary selection were the lack of reagent supply for comparative evaluations, the problems with data reproducibility, and the inability to accept data variations. The most problematic part of comparative evaluations was sample collection. It didn't matter if the number of samples requested was large and the capacity needed for the test was small. It was difficult to collect various concentration samples in the case of a small number of tests(100 cases per month or less), and it was difficult to conduct a recovery rate test in the case of a relatively large volume of samples required for a single test(more than 100 uL). In addition, the lack of dilution solution or standard zero material for sensitivity measurement or dilution tests was one of the problems. Conclusion Comparative evaluation for changing test reagents require appropriate preparation time to collect diverse and sufficient samples. In addition, setting the total sample volume and reagent volume range required for comparative evaluations, depending on the sample volume and reagent volume required for one test, will reduce the burden of sample collection and planning for each comparative evaluation.