The development of China's construction industry is presented by describing its current status and highlighting its achievements, identifying the main constraints preventing the industry from playing a more effective and efficient role in the country's economic development. Fundamental changes...

A new scheduling method is presented in this paper which overcomes the inability of the line of balance (LOB) method to control the interval times between adjacent activities in a repetitive construction unit. The interval times are analysed and then expressed as functions of the number of...

Automatic identification (auto-ID) technologies such as bar coding have become widespread within manufacturing, medicine and retailing. Bar coding has also attracted many applications within the US construction industry, providing tangible cost savings through improved speed and accuracy of data...

A continuous model and a combined event-process discrete model are developed by employing the Slam II general purpose simulation language. The continuous model addressed the on-going progress of the construction process on a higher level; and the combined event-process discrete model describes...

Construction problem solving characterizes much of construction management practice and thus is an important research domain. Nonetheless, research in construction problem solving has not yet crossed the threshold into a mature discipline as there is no universally accepted theory for...

A probabilistic framework is developed to analyse a risk management approach adopted by an insurance firm. The analysis shows that when the insurance firm classifies a client as 'superior' and 'most acceptable', the probability of the insurer having to pay out on those claims is negligible. Even...

Different categories of delay and the different types of delay found on construction projects are identified. Existing methods for assessing the effect of delaying events are reviewed and the results of an industry survey presented. None of the commonly recognized methods for delay analysis...

The amount of money invested in the building industry in the last two decades in Saudi Arabia is about SR 1251 ($234) billion. The result is a stock of large projects in housing, hospitals, universities (seven in number) etc. These buildings require efficient maintenance programmes to enable...

Hong Kong's construction industry has had a poor site safety record for over a decade. Behaviour-based methods of safety management (BSM) have proved successful in other industries and in other countries. Hence, this study aimed to test the effectiveness of BSM by applying goal-setting and...

The paper provides an overview of qualifications in the German construction workforce and draws comparisons with the situation in the British construction industry. The German system of general education and vocational training is outlined. Data from a variety of sources are used to describe...