Engineering Construction & Architectural Management

Willie Tan

2003 Engineering Construction & Architectural Management

doi: 10.1108/09699980310466569

This paper examines the way the Japanese education system strategically channels talent towards its elite universities, turning out a high proportion of engineers and architects for the construction industry. At the same time, it provides limited education for construction workers and technicians in public vocational institutes and technical colleges, preferring to turn out a highly educated workforce of generalists who are trained for specific jobs by employers through the training centres of large firms, private vocational institutes, or on-the-job training by smaller subcontractors.

C.S. Poon; Ann T.W. Yu; L.H. Ng

2003 Engineering Construction & Architectural Management

doi: 10.1108/09699980310466578

Hong Kong is running out of both reclamation sites and landfill space for the disposal of construction and demolition waste. This paper reports on the findings of a study, consisting of a questionnaire survey, interviews and work-site visits, to compare the use of low-waste building technologies in public housing and private residential projects in Hong Kong. The results show that large panel formwork and prefabricated building components are widely used in public housing projects in Hong Kong. Due to the difference of the design with public housing, the use of smaller aluminium panel formwork is more common in the private housing projects. The barriers for the adoption of low-waste building technologies in the private sector are identified and discussed.

C.H. Wong; J. Nicholas; G.D. Holt

2003 Engineering Construction & Architectural Management

doi: 10.1108/09699980310466587

Today's growing numbers of contractor selection methodologies reflect the increasing awareness of the construction industry for improving its procurement process and performance. This paper investigates contractor classification methods that link clients' selection aspirations and contractor performance. Multivariate techniques were used to study the intrinsic link between clients' selection preferences, i.e. project-specific criteria (PSC) and their respective levels of importance assigned (LIA), during tender evaluation for modelling contractor classification models in a data set of 68 case studies of UK construction projects. The logistic regression (LR) and multivariate discriminant analysis (MDA) were used. Results revealed that both techniques produced a good prediction on contractor performance and indicated that suitability of the equipment, past performance in cost and time on similar projects, contractor relationship with local authority, and contractor reputation/image are the most predominant PSC in the LR and MDA models among the 34 PSC. Suggests contractor classification models using multivariate techniques could be developed further.

Charles Vee; CMartin Skitmore

2003 Engineering Construction & Architectural Management

doi: 10.1108/09699980310466596

Provides results of a small, but representative, questionnaire survey of typical project managers, architects and building contractors concerning their views and experiences on a range of ethical issues surrounding construction industry activities. Most (90 per cent) subscribed to a professional code of ethics and many (45 per cent) had an ethical code of conduct in their employing organisations, with the majority (84 per cent) considering good ethical practice to be an important organisational goal. It was agreed by 93 per cent of the respondents that "business ethics" should be driven or governed by "personal ethics", with 84 per cent of respondents stating that a balance of both the requirements of the client and the impact on the public should be maintained. No respondent was aware of any cases of employers attempting to force their employees to initiate, or participate in, unethical conduct. Despite this, all the respondents had witnessed or experienced some degree of unethical conduct, in the form of unfair conduct, negligence, conflict of interest, collusive tendering, fraud, confidentiality and propriety breach, bribery and violation of environmental ethics.

Jason Underwood; Alastair Watson

2003 Engineering Construction & Architectural Management

doi: 10.1108/09699980310466604

A three year Esprit project - ProCure - is ultimately aiming to take a significant but achievable step forward in the application of available information and communication technology (ICT) to the large scale engineering (LSE) construction industry. The ProCure consortium consists of five industrial partners supported by four associated research and expert partners. The project combines leading expertise from three member states to support ICT deployment by three industrial collaborative groups, i.e. UK, Germany and Finland. The basis of the project is in the partners' belief that sufficient ICT is now available to achieve deployment, with care, in real projects, with an acceptable risk of failure. This paper presents work undertaken within the project to investigate the various metadata standards that exist in order to define a minimum metadata set based on these standards for the implementation of two demonstrators for XML based automated document exchange between a simulation of a corporate document management system and a simulation of a collaborative construction project Web site.

Thomas K.L. Tong; C.M. Tam

2003 Engineering Construction & Architectural Management

doi: 10.1108/09699980310466613

Multi-skilled labour allocation in a defined time frame falls into the class of non-polynomial (NP) hard problems, solutions to which can only be obtained through repeated trials and errors. The application of fuzzy genetic algorithms (GA) optimisation model provides an efficient way to arrive at a "near-optimal" solution. In this paper, a fuzzy GA optimisation model of labour allocation is presented to illustrate how the near optimal solution can be obtained.