Very few construction companies and consulting firms in Australia measure their costs of quality. Consequently, it is difficult for them to prove that systems for preventing quality failures are cost-effective. Although the direct costs of a quality system can be quantified with some accuracy...

The briefing process is critical to the successful delivery of construction projects. Although a number of briefing guides have been developed, attempting to address the problems of briefing, they are often criticized as being too general and implicit. This paper describes a structured framework...

A remarkable disagreement/deviation between the rate of ISO 14001 registration and the rate of implementation of environmental impact assessment in the Chinese construction industry indicates that the contractors there might not have really applied environmental management (EM) in construction...

Learning from manufacturing industries is a useful approach to improving the productivity of the construction industry and to solve problems arising from construction processes. Through the use of virtual prototyping (VP) technology, the lean production process engaged in the IKEA business model...

Contractor selection is one of the main activities of clients. Without a proper and accurate method for selecting the most appropriate contractor, the performance of the project will be affected. The multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is suggested to be a viable method for contractor...

Many construction organizations have misunderstood the reality that total quality management (TQM) based on continuous improvement requires a commitment to learning and that essentially it is the means to a learning organization. The paper argues that if the construction industry is to improve...

In 2014, more than 43 cities in China were racing to construct their urban rail systems (including metro and light rail systems), recognizing that an urban rail system will be a good solution to the tough problems that they are faced with, including traffic congestion and PM2.5 air pollution. On...

Mobile/tower cranes are the most essential forms of construction plant in use in the construction industry but are also the subject of several safety issues. Of these, blind lifting has been found to be one of the most hazardous of crane operations. To improve the situation, a real-time...

The stochastic resonance (SR) in a second-order linear system driven by a trichotomous noise and an external periodic signal is investigated. By the use of the properties of the trichotomous noise and the Shapiro–Loginov formula, the exact expression for the output spectral amplification (SPA)...