Total spending on building maintenance in the UK has increased by 66% in the last 10 years (BMI, 1996). Total expenditure on maintenance in 1997 was £39.8 billion (BMI, 1998). Any significant reduction in building maintenance costs will therefore have a real impact on the national economy. This...

Major road maintenance projects need an accurate cost estimate at the early stage of design. At present, simple and quick models are lacking. Two easy-to-use cost models for major asphalt road maintenance projects are developed. The double mean model and the trend line model are based on the...

Planning is a vital element of project management but it is still not recognized as a process variable. Its objective should be to outperform the initially defined processes, and foresee and overcome possible undesirable events. Detailed task-level master planning is unrealistic since one cannot...

The built environment is full of uncertainty which leads to risk. The literature shows that there is a wide range of techniques available to deal with risk; however numerous studies have shown that only a relatively small number are used in practice. One reason for this small number is a lack of...

The Building Maintenance Cost Information Service (BMCIS) offers a comprehensive and rigorous framework for collecting data about the running costs of buildings. Nevertheless, it is pitched at such a level of detail that the amount of data collected and analysed may be constrained. This paper...

The learning phenomenon has proved applicable in various industries, especially those associated with mass productions, such as aircraft and automobile assembly. The learning process in labour-intensive industries is assumed to be more significant in the sense that automated work is constrained...