A recent, major UK research project investigated technical and social aspects of reducing the CO2 emissions of UK domestic housing by 50% by the year 2030. As 80% of the UK housing stock that will be present in 2030 has already been built, this study aimed to research the whole life costs of...

There has been a range of initiatives across many countries over the last 10 to 15 years to introduce reform to the construction process in order to improve performance. The so-called UK 'Continuous Improvement' programme is evaluated as a case study through an analysis of demonstration...

Services are very important to the UK balance of trade; a surplus has been recorded for trade in services every year since 1966. Construction professional services exports (CPS), which cover architecture, engineering and surveying (AES), have also increased, contributing over £3bn to the UK trade...

Resource levelling techniques aim to minimize the fluctuation from one time period to another in resource usage. Except for small-sized problems, though, computational optimization procedures are inefficient when solving construction resource levelling problems. Consequently, heuristic and...

The United States government's differing conditions clause poses extensive legal and financial risk. This contract clause addresses Type I and Type II unforeseen conditions. A Type I condition occurs when a latent physical condition materially differs from that condition indicated in the bidding...

Construction supply chains encompass the flows of materials, labour, information, plant, equipment and temporary works that originate from a variety of different parties. The impact of various supply chain management practices on project performance has been measured, through a combination of a...

Reduction in construction project duration is generally linked to additional cost due to more expensive resources required. Hence tradeoff between time and cost is crucial to the efficiency of a construction project. The time-cost tradeoff (TCT) issue has been studied through various...

Every year the construction industry accounts for a disproportionate injury rate when compared to the all-industry average. In recent years, incident rates have declined as a result of improvements in safety management. While there is a great deal of knowledge regarding the safety management...

Many clients nowadays scrutinize consultants' performance carefully before determining which company should be awarded a consultancy assignment. Despite that, evaluating the performance of an engineering consultant is seldom conducted in a systematic manner, as every assessor has his/her own...

Infrastructure projects are still being plagued by cost overruns, delays and revenue shortfalls despite decades of practice and research. Risk-based estimating (RBE) is growing in popularity and has the potential to overcome the two main cost overrun factors—optimistic bias and strategic...