Construction management research at the interface of design and explanatory science

As a tribute to Ray Levitt’s early computer science contributions, this paper presents the research methodology he and I in close collaboration with Barbara Hayes-Roth followed to develop the SightPlan system. This research methodology falls under the umbrella of what is known as “design science.” Design science concerns itself with designing and making artefacts to fulfil a purpose, and then testing and validating that they indeed are fit-for-purpose. Design science does not belong in the category of physical science or of fundamental science; instead, it falls in the category of the sciences of the artificial. This paper describes the methodological steps pursued in design science and in parallel illustrates how these steps were instantiated and what artefacts were produced in the course of developing the SightPlan system, a blackboard expert system that lays out temporary facilities on construction sites. The aims of this paper are to recognise Ray’s work as an advisor and researcher, reflect on and promote the use of design science in construction management and economics and thereby participate in the ongoing discussion on research methods in this journal, and illustrate to scholars in this field that research is an opportunistic endeavour.

.The collection of research papers under this RT aims to provide a unique platform for both doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, as well as their supervisors and collaborators, to present excellent research outcomes in the subject field of construction management. This RT is therefore open to all academics and professionals who have been making the best endeavors for outstanding doctoral research in construction management. Issues under this RT should relate to all theoretical and practical developments of construction management. An annual collection of published papers under this RT helps to form an ebook series on the same topic to stimulate discovery and innovation among doctoral researchers around the world.Papers published within this topical collection are eligible for the Frontiers Best Doctoral Research Award for Construction Management. The winner of this award, as adjudicated by Frontiers and the RT editors of this collection, will receive a certificate and a prize equivalent to about $2000 in the form of a full waiver for a free Open Access publication in Frontiers in Built Environment. This RT is supported by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB)one of the most influential professional body for construction management around the worldon the "CIOB Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research Contributions to Construction Management".This RT has achieved the first volume of topical collection consisting of ten full-length papers by PhD candidates, their supervisors and collaborators. These papers are contributions from 27 authors (See Table 1). A brief introduction about these published papers is given below to readers. for decentralizing decision-making in Takt production). The outcomes from research described in this paper have both theoretical and practical implications for enhanced decision making support in construction process management. .Table 2 gives a summary of these ten papers with regard to their contributions through research to the Construction Management Body of Knowledge (CMBOK) (Chen, 2019) in related domains.TABLE 2: A reflection on research contributions.Special thanks to three academic colleagues, including Yongkui Li at Tongji University in China, Samad Sepasgozar at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and Søren Wandahl at Aarhus University in Denmark, for their time and strong supports as Handling Editor in the peer review process when the editors were not available. The Construction Management section of Frontiers in Built Environment has their continuous supports as Associate Editor.The editors are grateful to colleagues at Frontiers for their professional supports to launch this research topic, invite participants, coordinate peer reviews, and produce publications.This RT is strongly supported by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) for the CIOB Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research Contributions to Construction Management. The editors are grateful to Lynne McKay, Regional Manager Scotland at the CIOB, for the establishment of this new academic award to encourage doctoral research in construction management around the world. Special thanks to Wilma Marshall at the CIOB for coordinating this unique award.

Most studies published in Technovation adopt a theory-driven approach toward empirical phenomena. In this editorial, we call for a more instrumental approach, one that effectively serves the needs of practitioners in the field of technological innovation as well as scholars seeking to increase their impact on innovation practice. In this respect, design science (DS) methodologies have emerged in various adjacent domains such as information systems, operations management, and entrepreneurship. Inspired by Simon's “The Sciences of the Artificial”, DS operates at the interface of problem-solving design and explanatory science to create and test solutions as artifacts. Whereas DS work can result in various kinds of artifacts, tools for practitioners are the most promising ones. We first provide several examples of DS work resulting in widely used tools and then identify various challenges in the technological innovation domain that call for tools addressing these challenges. Subsequently, we provide practical guidance on how to prepare manuscripts about designing and testing tools which are likely to have a major impact on practice.

Rivalry competitiveness, significant capital investments, and cultural diversity are defining the construction industry’s evolving nature. Therefore, construction organizations have to manage their construction projects’ relationships carefully. Construction management researchers have progressively recognized the intelligible link between Relationship Management and construction project performance. However, few studies structurally reviewed the precipitated progression in this topic. This paper follows a systematic approach to review the literature from reliable databases and prominent journals between 2000–2020 in topics associated with Relationship Management in construction projects. This investigation sets to identify the key characteristics, categorial dimensions, attributes, or enablers of relationship management in construction. More than 500 articles were explored in this systematic review by thorough keyword research, out of which 73 articles were found relevant to this topic where an explicit content analysis was carried out. The findings identified 18 key Relationship Management characteristics classified into four categories: Contract-related, Management-related, Team-related, and General characteristics. Project Managers are recommended to pay specific attention on investigated characteristics to strengthen relationships, promote collaboration, and thereby foster project performance.

Gathering knowledge from expert practitioners is a hallmark of construction engineering and management research. However, the knowledge gathered is dependent on the knowledge of the people we talk to. Accordingly, this paper used a content analysis of 12 months of recent technical articles and case study publications in the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management to explore characteristics of research respondents that authors publishing in this journal feel are important to document. Authors report some subset of research respondents' job type or role, years of experience, subject matter expertise, geography or nationality, organization and sector details, project type, professional qualifications, sex, race and ethnicity, ability, and language. Accordingly, this paper recommends that researchers should report at least these categories, and that researchers also should discuss research limitations that may result from the types of people they collect knowledge from. This change will make visible voices that are dominant or underrepresented in construction engineering and management research. In addition, by eliminating an otherwise unstated limitation, this change will result in improved construction engineering and management science.

The field of management research has an utilisation problem. A considerable avenue in which the translation from theory to practice has been only partial is the management control of inter-organisational relationships. In this particular stream of management (accounting) research, open-book accounting (OBA) is a key concept. Based on the OBA literature, our ambition is to develop an implementation framework for inter-organisational mediums (IFFIM). The first part of the framework, IFFIM_1: the relational view is concerned with the multidimensional nature of inter-organisational relationships by illustrating relational complexities through the OBA dimensions. The second part of the framework, IFFIM_2: the process view is an outlook to the stepwise implementation process, where the factors that influence OBA implementation have been integrated to the phases of the so-called enterprise system experience cycle. Unlike most contemporary research, our work is based on the idea of 'design science', the aim of which is to develop general knowledge to support the design of solutions to field problems. IFFIM is a design exemplar to practitioners, i.e., a guideline to follow in the design of interventions.

Expertise tends to be seen as something people possess: one needs to have the knowledge, skills and competences to be able to do a job well, preferably better than others, under various conditions. In practice not all objectively relevant knowledge and expertise gets endorsed as such. In multi-party settings different forms of expertise tend to compete with one another. The latter is certainly true for the construction sector in which parties with different backgrounds, stakes and interests work together in order to create or maintain buildings and infrastructural works. Existing knowledge and expertise need to be performed in order to get treated as relevant to the interactional business at hand by the people one collaborates with. Whose expertise is treated as most salient may differ across interaction settings that make up the different phases of a project. So far, however, what expertise is treated as relevant when in the day-to-day management of construction projects and the effects thereof have been understudied. The argument put forward is that expertise research informed by the performative turn in the social sciences may enrich the construction management research agenda. Performative studies tend to further insight in what expertise ends up to being treated as relevant when in actual practice, e.g. by researching how various expertises are discursively positioned relative to one another in multi-party settings. Insight into how and when existing expertise counts may be of help in developing strategies to ensure that expertise that is considered relevant but is underused in practice may be optimally deployed in the future. General directions are provided for how expertise may be researched from a performative perspective in construction.

Long-term Trends in Construction Engineering and Management Research in Korea

Sequential mixed methods research is an effective approach for investigating complex problems, but it has not been extensively used in construction management research. In South Africa, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has seen construction management taking on a vital responsibility since the government called upon the private sector to play a greater part in combating HIV/AIDS. However, the South African construction industry has been slow in responding to this call, and many organisations are not fully aware of what such involvement might mean. A sequential mixed methods research approach was used to investigate this problem. As the research is ongoing, it is described in this article as a research journey; the findings of each stage have determined the best method for the next. Findings of each stage are not presented in detail, since the main purpose of this article is to show the effectiveness of the research method. The approach commenced with a quantitative survey to establish base-line information. Semi-structured interviews then yielded richer qualitative data before quantitative datasets were revisited to exploit their potential for more complex analysis and modelling. Findings to date show that corporate knowledge about HIV/AIDS is inconsistent, that intervention management may miss the population most affected, and that the stigma of being HIV+ is a major barrier that frequently prevents disclosure and thus misses the benefits that employer organisations can bring. The construction industry needs to find better ways to promote disclosure and minimise stigmatisation. The applied example shows that the adoption of sequential mixed methods has responded to individual stage data needs and provided essential flexibility for the research. It is an effective approach where end outcomes are not sufficiently clear at the outset of the research.

Since 2001, a link has been established between the Last Planner® System (LPS) and Linguistic Action Perspective (LAP). However, to date, it has not been studied in sufficient depth. This research developed a system of indicators to measure and control the management of commitments, through the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, and thus contribute to the development of the social dimension of sustainability that is often neglected in construction management research. The main contributions of this paper are a proposal of five main activities to apply the DSR method, a checklist to analyze the engagement of meeting participants, a notebook for last planners, delve into the variations that can occur to the basic movements of LAP, and the creation of a system of indicators hence updating the Percent Plan Complete (PPC) with a reliability indicator. The main limitation of this research is that the system was only validated in two South American countries that implemented LPS. In future studies, we propose to apply case studies in weekly planning meetings in other industries worldwide and to determine the recommended values to improve communication and achieve the proper implementation of LAP with LPS and without LPS.

Extended reality (XR) technologies are increasingly being used as a novel research instrument to facilitate scientific inquires in the construction engineering and management (CEM) domain. By allowing humans to interact with immersive environments in controlled and monitored experimental settings, XR technologies have opened new opportunities for researchers to conduct CEM research involving human participants or concerning human behavior. Yet, XR-enabled research, as an independent, rigorous methodology for the CEM domain, is still underexplored. This paper serves as an effort to build an organized knowledge base and workflow for using XR technologies in various CEM research areas and methodological contexts. The paper first investigates the status quo of XR-enabled CEM research, by identifying current research areas in the CEM domain where XR technologies are considered the preferred or recommended methodological solutions. A process model for XR-enabled research is then proposed, with actionable recommendations about how XR-enabled research should be planned, designed, implemented, analyzed, verified, and validated. This process model is demonstrated with two illustrative case studies. Last, the paper discusses the philosophical, methodological, and technological roots of the evolution of XR-enabled CEM research and describes our vision of more enabling, adoptable, and value-adding XR-enabled research in CEM in the near future.

The University of Washington’s Department of Construction Management is in the process of developing interdisciplinary research and experiential education in construction engineering and management (CEM) with the creation of the 28,000 ft2 Pacific Northwest Center for construction research and education (PNCCRE). In doing so, the department has identified challenges, limitations, and issues centered on bringing industry experience into the classroom and bringing researchers together from diverse disciplines from across the university. The University of Washington envisions the PNCCRE as a place where learners will experience CEM theory and skills firsthand in an interdisciplinary research environment that will foster innovation. This paper focuses on how the Department of Construction Management at the University of Washington is reenvisioning its research and education activities to take advantage of the new PNCCRE facility. In the education front, this paper introduces “the experience learning model,” a...

To enable efficient managerial decisions in planning and generation of construction process, we need technologies to analyze and evaluate their conditions and to predict their further evolution. One of advanced methods to generate them is based on artificial neural networks (ANN). This paper represents the outcome from a research in construction process organization and management to build roof structures at the planning and operation stage, assisted by the ANN methodology. Relying on systems analysis and expert survey, the authors have designed a 4-layer feedforward ANN with a node pattern of 15-6-3-1. The authors used the concept of fuzzy sets to measure input and output of the network. The paper clearly illustrates the function of ANN and describes the learning algorithm by the backward propagation of errors relative to the resulting ANN. The authors have identified problems related to generation of the labeled training data in the researched field and developed a network learning approach that combines extraction of expert knowledge about the system with learning on training examples from real-life construction project.

The territorial systems’ development deformation in socio-economic aspects is a key problem in ensuring the sustainable development of the country’s regions. The result of imbalances is a decrease in living standards, the effectiveness of the manufacturing sector’s individual sectors. In this regard, consideration of the effectiveness of management systems’ improving, based on the methodological tools’ development for assessing the balanced development of territories, is imperative to achieve the concept of sustainable functioning of any state. With regard to the construction production, this approach will allow us to formulate a concept for the company’s development and transfer it into the specific strategic objectives’ plane. The current system of construction management, based on the self-development and self-government principles, is an imperative to ensure the balanced innovative development. However, the transition to a new stage of functioning is fraught with a number of problems requiring an adequate approach and quick resolution. The study substantiates the main provisions of the self-regulatory mechanism of construction production, proposes a methodological toolkit for assessing the effectiveness of the management system based on a balanced system of indicators for the construction production. It is based on the principle of maintaining a balance between the payback of innovative products, consumer preferences, the harmony of interests and needs of the society, comparing the investment and the volume of output in a regional context. The proposed approaches to assessing the construction management effectiveness while striving for a balanced development are universal in nature and can be used for various sectors of the regional economy of the primary, tertiary and quaternary sectors.

Moreover, there is an increasing amount of literature covering specific geotechnical risk analysis and management topics. Examples of these are the difference between unsafe geotechnical certainty and safe geotechnical uncertainty (Barends, 2005), the role of the human factor in achieving geotechnical reliability (Bea, 2006), objective and subjective ways of geotechnical risk classification (Altabba et al., 2004), and contractual allocation of geotechnical risk (Essex, 2007).