Bridge management is the decision-making process for selecting and prioritizing the actions necessary to maintain a bridge within acceptable limits of safety and serviceability. The current decision-making approach for bridge management is based on optimizing the life cycle cost of the...

A pre-tender building cost estimate is an important piece of information when making decisions at the project planning and design stage. The important project characteristics influencing the accuracy of pre-tender building cost estimates are examined and practical improvement for increasing the...

Research into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for partnering projects in construction becomes vital because an increasing trend of client organizations has been observed to introduce a partnering approach to their building and construction works internationally during the last decade. A...

Theoretical understanding of the implementation and use of innovations within construction contexts is discussed and developed. It is argued that both the rhetoric of the 'improvement agenda' within construction and theories of innovation fail to account for the complex contexts and disparate...

A key point in value engineering (VE) methodology is to acquire and apply knowledge of the assorted fields. An appropriate definition of VE expert knowledge flow could, therefore, yield more productive VE workshops. A conceptual expert case-based reasoning (CBR) framework is introduced in this...

Many large contractors in Vietnam are lacking an effective method to measure their performance and identify weaknesses and threats. The integration of the balanced scorecard (BSC) and strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT) matrix is described to evaluate the strategic performance of...

A web-based national questionnaire survey of the opinions of registered South African quantity surveyors was undertaken to establish their levels of job satisfaction. Issues explored included demographic factors; factors influencing job satisfaction; choice of career; gender and race in the...

The role of construction in economic development is an important issue facing the construction research community, government and international development agencies. Based on empirical analyses, the complexities of the relationship between construction activity and stage of economic development...

Much research effort to date has focused on the development and use of bidding models in optimizing contractors' bid prices in competitive tendering environments. Unbalanced bidding models, in particular, have the objective of maximizing a project's prospective profits by using techniques of...

Construction managerial literature often argues that there are gains to be made by using partnering. Voices have however been raised to approach partnering in a more neutral perspective and with well-founded methods of evaluation. This study can be seen as an outcome of the criticisms against...