Is construction an industry?

There has been a frequent misconception in analyses of construction sectors of the national economy: the tendency to describe these activities as ‘an industry’ or a small and stable set of ‘industries’. This has led to confusion. Construction was inappropriately assimilated to various forms of manufacturing industry. Characteristics of the construction process were treated as ‘problems’, to whose solution substantial energies were unnecessarily diverted. There has been muddle about the extent to which macro-level planning is appropriate, notably on R&D strategies and innovation for improved industrial efficiency. Construction projects increasingly use unfamiliar technological bases, comparable to ‘technology fusion’ in other sectors. A more fruitful emphasis may be to regard construction as organized as agglomerations of projects - rather than as a discrete industry or a fixed constellation of firms. The idea of the ‘demand chain’ is introduced.

The paper concludes that a ‘technological paradigm’ should replace the ‘industry paradigm’ and that an enduring question remains to explore what is meant by construction ‘capacity’.     

Gas field construction on time

About one--fOurth of the con- sery'e capacity at l00 billion cubic me-struction on China's largest off shore tres.drilling field is now complete. and en- By January 30. more than 240gineers say the projcct is on schedule kilo1netres ol' underu:ater pipelinestbr opening January l. l996. u:ere laid. about one fourth of the to-The Ya l3-- l Gas Field in the ta1. according yesterday's o\'erseas edi-South Chlna Sea wiIl suppl} Hong tion or People's Dall}'.Kong and Hainan Province w'ith natu- Exentually tuo underuaterral gas. Estimates put the tield's re- pipeIInes 'iIl he constructedt one. 9l     

Time‐dependent construction social costs model

Negative impacts of construction works on local traffic, environment and business have been pointed out by previous researchers. However, little work has been conductd on the quantification of such costs. A time‐dependent construction social costs (COSCO) model is developed for quantifying the negative impacts that result from construction operations during the field execution phase. The COSCO model is a simplified but practical model that calculates the construction social costs in a conservative way. A roadwork construction project is used to show the applicability of the COSCO model. It is found that the daily social cost was US$18?188–5.52 times the project construction cost. This is a striking illustration of management techniques for mediating the social costs of construction projects.     

What constitutes good production flow in construction?

The notion of production flow is not well understood in the context of construction. A coherent, consistent theoretical model of flow would have practical value as it would support development of better approaches to managing production within and across projects and of measures of flow quality needed to implement them. A literature review and analysis of existing conceptualizations of flow in manufacturing and in construction lead to formulation of a model of construction flow that has three interrelated but distinct axes: project portfolio, process and operations flows. A tentative set of ideal conditions for good flow was formulated with regard to each of these three primary flows. The review, the summary model and the set of conditions provide a basis for further research and development of a comprehensive model of flow in construction and a definition of what constitutes good flow.     

The book for the fine art of construction

The fully revised 1999 edition of the Steel Construction Manual is a comprehensive work for architects and engineers covering planning and construction using steel. A variety of warehouse, multi-storey and special buildings have been selected to illuminate interesting structural designs in detail.     

Electronic commerce in construction—trends and prospects

There is growing interest in the conduct of business transactions by electronic means through the Internet and/or dedicated networks; this is often referred to as electronic commerce. This paper reviews developments in electronic commerce, with a particular focus on its applicability and uptake within the construction industry. Electronic commerce business models are reviewed and the enablers and barriers to their uptake in the construction sector presented. The paper concludes with future trends in electronic commerce and the need for construction organisations to make the necessary investments that will enable them to take advantage of these.     

Handling construction pollutions using multi‐objective optimization

Quantitative assessment of emissions associated with construction projects should be carried out during the planning phase of the projects. This is important to detect and highlight any excesses of residuals during the construction phase. A newly developed framework is proposed to handle construction pollution using multi‐objective optimization. The approach, utilized by the proposed framework, is based on calculating the generated pollution for each activity involved in the project, as a result of dust, harmful gases and noise. The results of the quantitative assessment are integrated in a utility function that expresses the amount of total pollution. Then, evolutionary genetic algorithms (GAs) are used to carry multi‐objective optimization, considering three objective functions (project duration, project cost and total pollution). The proposed application considers the dynamic nature of construction activities including different types of relationships and the change of activities' criticality. An actual case study is worked out to demonstrate the practical use of the proposed framework and to investigate the sensitivity of its parameters.     

An input–output analysis of Thailand's construction sector

Three input–output (IO) tables compiled between 1995 and 2000 were used to examine the significance of the construction sector and its relationships with other sectors of the Thai economy. The pull and push effect of the Thai construction sector to the national economy indicated that the former is much larger than the latter. Additionally, the relatively high output multipliers and backward linkage indicators showed that the construction sector had the potential to trigger off production in many economic sectors linked to it. An aggregated sectoral analysis revealed the high dependence of construction on manufacturing followed by services. The findings also suggest that the trends of the profile of inputs and outputs are correlated to the economic conditions in Thailand at the time the IO tables were compiled. Finally, the results of employment analysis showed that although the share of construction sector in direct employment generation may not be very large, its economic importance lies in its direct and indirect contribution to employment through strong backward linkage effects. Consequently, when its backward linkages and output multiplier are considered together with the employment opportunities latent within it, then the construction sector could be a major contributor to the economic growth of Thailand.     

Risk analysis in fixed-price design–build construction projects

Construction projects are being tendered and implemented under different contract systems and payment methods. Design–build has been a popular contract system in recent years. It provides various advantages through entailing the contractor carrying out and being responsible for not only construction but also the design of the work. However, design–build turns out to be a risky system for both owners and contractors unless the risks are identified, analyzed and managed throughout the tender preparation and project execution stages. In this context, this study aims to present a literature survey on the issues of risk, risk management/analysis and the design–build contract system, to propose a schedule and cost risk analysis model, and to show the applicability of these models in scheduling and cost estimation of a fixed-price design–build construction project through a case study.     

Benefit evaluation for off‐site production in construction

Evaluating to what extent a component or building system should be produced off‐site is inadequate within the industry. The potential benefits of off‐site production (OSP) are commonly cited when justifying an OSP approach, yet holistic and methodical assessments of the applicability and overall benefit of these solutions, to a particular project, have been found to be deficient. Common methods of evaluation simply take material, labour and transportation costs into account when comparing various options, often disregarding other cost‐related items such as site facilities, crane use and rectification of works. These cost factors are usually buried within the nebulous preliminaries figure, with little reference to the building approach taken. Further, softer issues such as health and safety, effects on management and process benefits are either implicit or disregarded within these comparison exercises. Yet it is demonstrated that these issues are some of the most significant benefits of OSP. A series of case studies demonstrated that evaluation focus is almost solely on direct material and labour costs of components, without explicit regard for the wider cost or soft issue implications of OSP on a project. The paper argues that until evaluation is more holistic and value‐based rather than cost‐based, OSP uptake in construction will be slow.     

Input–output analysis of the Chinese construction sector

The construction sector has played a key role in the Chinese economy, which has been experiencing a rapid growth for the past two decades. This development and growth are reviewed in a framework of input–output analysis. The national input–output table (IO table) was used to study the current input–output profile of the Chinese construction sector and the relationship between the construction sector and other sectors. The pull and push effect of the Chinese construction industry to the whole national economy has been estimated. It shows that the pull effect is much larger than the push effect. Furthermore, through the analysis of a series of four IO tables spanning over the last 10 years, it reveals that the pull and push effect of the Chinese construction industry are both getting larger and larger. This means the Chinese construction industry is becoming mature and is in great transition.     

A ‘Strategy-as-Practice’ exploration of lean construction strategizing

A growing body of work emerging from the management and organizational studies literature is the ‘Strategy-as-Practice’ (SaP) perspective, which focuses on the ways in which strategy is actually enacted within organizational settings. This perspective is used to examine the diffusion of lean construction. In recent years lean construction has grown in prominence to become one of the primary performative improvement recipes for the construction sector. However, rather than providing a stable strategy around which more collaborative, intelligent and efficient project-based organizations develop, this research reveals how the lean concept transforms during its journey with unintended organizational consequences. An ethnographic case study, informed by SaP, demonstrates how a lean strategy and its effects on organizational practice and culture cannot be understood separately from material and embodied practices and power effects. As well as contributing to the examination of lean construction practice, the findings show how strategy is enacted within construction organizations and the ensuing effects of social power. A new trajectory is opened for research into strategizing within construction organizations, which provides ways to explore actual practices and spaces where strategizing occurs.     

Residential construction as a challenge- flexible floor plans in detail

From the floor plan to technical construction - the fundamentals of residential planning Housing layouts should be as varied as the lifestyles of their residents. Architects and planners are called on to develop flexible solutions. The growing demand for living space in conurbations makes this an increasingly challenging and com- plex task. High-density living documents the entire bandwidth of this task with international projects as examples. The uniform graphic representation of floor plans and large-scale detailed drawings makes the high architectural and design quality of residential areas legible and easy to compare.     

Promoting construction workers’ health: a multi-level system perspective

Construction workers suffer poor mental and physical health. To address this, organizations have implemented behavioural health promotion programmes. However, targeting workers’ lifestyle behaviour without addressing relevant environmental factors is unlikely to produce significant or sustained improvement. An ecological perspective offers a different way of understanding the determinants of health, reflecting the interplay of factors at multiple levels and the dynamic, reciprocal and non-linear relationships between them. Qualitative data collected during focus groups and in interviews with workers and managers were analysed to explore factors impacting the effectiveness of a health promotion programme implemented at two work sites in Queensland, Australia. A qualitative causal loop diagram identifying determinants of construction workers’ health behaviour was developed. The findings suggest that the adoption of healthy behaviours is influenced by factors operating at and between individual, family, workplace and industry levels. These factors suggest key leverage points that can be addressed in the design of future health promotion interventions for the construction industry. The research provides qualitative evidence of the need to consider workers’ health in a holistic way and develop multi-level strategies to produce improved health behaviour and outcomes in the construction industry.     

A model for smoothing time‐series data in construction

The understanding of the behaviour of time‐series data has been a matter of concern to researchers and practitioners in a variety of fields ranging from social science and economics to engineering. Also, the behaviour of many phenomena within fields relating and peripheral to construction is described as a time series. Typically, the time‐series analysis is carried out in order to forecast the future values of the series. These techniques, however, are also used to abstract the generalities within the series, hence facilitating the replication of the entire profile, reflecting only the main characteristics of the profile. There is a variety of techniques that can be applied to a set of time‐related data. The choice of the technique is, therefore, dependent on the nature of the problem and the characteristics of the data. The diversity of available techniques is, on the one hand an advantage for all analysts. However, this diversity is also an indication that there is no universal technique that is applicable to a diversity of time‐series data.

This work fundamentally addresses the issue of smoothing and curve‐fitting techniques rather than predicting and forecasting. A technique is offered which is tested against a set of criteria that are designed to focus on the accuracy of imitation and the practicality of operation: the ability to deal with a large number of time‐series sets of data in a consistent, replicable and automated way. The viability of the technique is demonstrated by its application to expenditure profiles of a large number of construction projects. The size of the sample and the diversity in the profiles of the expenditure patterns provided an appropriate testing ground for the universality of the model.

The results indicated that the model can effectively transform a jagged time series into a smooth pattern, while complying with a set of criteria many of which are common to several other research works relating to time‐series data analysis. The proposed technique sequences a number of basic smoothing methods and the process involves the treatment and incorporation of the residual values.     

Visual–auditory learning network for construction equipment action detection

Action detection of construction equipment is critical for tracking project performance, facilitating construction automation, and fostering construction efficiency in terms of construction site monitoring. Particularly, the auditory signal can provide additional information on computer vision-based action detection of various types of construction equipment. Therefore, this study aims to develop a visual–auditory learning network model for the action detection of construction equipment based on two modalities (i.e., vision and audition). To this end, both visual and auditory features are extracted from the multi-modal feature extractor. In addition, the multi-head attention and detection module is designed to conduct the localization and classification tasks in separate heads in which different attention mechanisms for each task are applied. Particularly, the content-based attention mechanism and the dot-product attention mechanism are, respectively, adopted for spatial attention in the localization head and channel attention in the classification head. The evaluation results show that the precision and recall of the proposed model can reach 86.92% and 84.00% with the adoption of the multi-head attention and detection module, which has proven to improve overall detection performance by utilizing different correlations of visual and auditory features for localization and classification, respectively.     

A construction project cash flow model—an idiographic approach

The paper introduces and supports the contention that an idiographic methodology is appropriate to the post- hoc study and interpretation of individual construction project cash flows. A cash flow model based on the logit transformation is proposed to be consistent with this methodology. The model is based on historical data, and yields two parameters to describe each individual project. The model is tested using two samples totalling 72 projects. Goodness of fit for the model, using a measure of standard deviation from 1.0% to 4.6%, with a median of 2.5%, is found for individual projects.

The experimental hypothesis (that there is substantial variation between projects) is supported by the graphical and statistical evidence of deviation, which is argued to be the result of the individual ontology of each project - systematic error - rather than random error from an ideal. The paper concludes that forecasts of individual cash flows are invalid when derived from analysis of grouped data.     

Interpersonal trust and inter‐firm trust in construction projects

Working relationships are important in effecting project performance and cooperation is believed to be a behavioural consequence of trust. Trust, being a quality of relationships, involves people interacting at interpersonal and inter‐firm levels. This is investigated through 10 partnering and non‐partnering projects, using a validated trust scale. A case study approach is used to collect qualitative data through a quantitative approach to help understand the concept of trust. Data were collected from clients, contractors, consultants and subcontractors. Clients and contractors have a tendency to trust individuals whereas contractors and subcontractors have a tendency to trust firms. Inter‐firm trust is better understood than interpersonal trust; but both are associated with keeping commitments and demonstrating cooperation, even though interpersonal trust is considered more important. Partnering does not necessarily exhibit more trust than non‐partnering projects whereas clients and contractors have different emphasis on interpersonal and inter‐firm trust. Therefore, to promote trusting relationships in multi‐parties is to fulfil not only the technological and economical goals, but also the moral and social goals as expressed in people relationships such that a socially safe working place can be created. For this reason, middle managers need to know about trust because they face more relationship problems than others.