Editorial: Doctoral research in construction management

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.

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

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.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to characterize construction management research at the interface of explanatory science and design science.Design/methodology/approach – The dual nature of construction management research is analyzed by relating this field of research to natural science, design science and its interface. Research at the interface of explanatory science and design science is characterized by identifying studies published on this interface in high quality construction management journals.Findings – Research at this interface should focus on technological rules developed through testing in practical contexts as in design science as well as grounding in the explanatory sciences. The nature of testing technological rules is highly similar to the replication logic recommended for comparative case studies.Research limitations/implications – Developing and testing technological rules combines the design science and the explanatory science mode of knowledge production in construction manage...

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.

Workers at four different woodworking processes--two logging sites, four sawmills, one major woodchipping operation, and five joineries situated in the state of New South Wales in Australia--were studied for personal inhalable dust exposures (N = 182). The geometric mean exposure at logging sites was 0.6 mg/m3 (N = 7), sawmills 1.6 mg/m3 (N = 93), woodchipping 1.9 mg/m3 (N = 9), and joineries 3.7 mg/m3 (N = 66). Overall, 62% of the exposures exceeded the current standards. Among joineries, 95% of the hardwood exposures and 35% of the softwood exposures were above the relevant standards. A majority of workers (approximately 90%) did not wear appropriate respirators approved for wood dust, while the ones who did wear them, used them on average less than 50% of the time. The significant determinants of personal wood dust exposures (n = 163) were found to be local exhaust ventilation, job title, use of handheld tools, cleaning method used, use of compressed air, and green or dry wood processed. Type of wood processed (softwood or hardwood) was not found to be statistically significant.

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.

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.

A NEW STRATEGY for establishing distinct chemical functionalities on the inside and outside of mesoporous silicon could advance design of sensors and drug delivery systems ( Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. , DOI: 10.1002/anie.200704784). Such a route would be useful, for example, for making a material with a drug stored inside its pores and an external coating of antibody that targets the site where the drug is to be delivered. Mesoporous materials have pores that range in size from 2 to 50 nm, which is advantageous for applications that involve biomolecules. For the materials to perform some of their intended tasks, the internal and external surfaces of the pores must be modified with different groups. But current methods cannot reliably and distinctively functionalize internal and external surfaces. Chemistry professor J. Justin Gooding at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and colleagues harnessed hydrophobicity to overcome these limitations. “We can couple completely different things to the inside ...

ABSTRACTA heavy rail system is a complex system of systems that has specific challenges for asset management. The introduction of modern digital systems into existing rail systems adds further to this complexity. The Asset Standards Authority of Transport for New South Wales in Australia is introducing model‐based systems engineering through the use of an architecture framework populated using the Systems Modeling Language (SysML), referred to hereafter as the Transport Network Architecture Framework (TNAF). The TNAF is intended initially to be used to act as a structure that will assist procurement through the depiction of the minimum standards to be met when specifying new systems to be acquired and integrated into the network. This article describes how architecture framework tools can be used for management of the various configurations.

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Design flood estimates for ungauged catchments are needed in the planning and design of bridges, culverts and many other water infrastructure projects. The most commonly used methods of flood estimation in practice for the ungauged catchments include the Index Flood Method, quantile regression technique and Probabilistic Rational Method (PRM). In Australia, the regional flood frequency estimation (RFFE) methods recommended in Australian Rainfall and Runoff (ARR) 1987 include PRM for eastern New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria States. In the upcoming ARR 2016, the recommended RFFE method is based on regression and region-of-influence approaches for NSW, which is referred to as RFFE Model 2015. In this study, a new PRM is developed and tested for NSW.

Christmas bush (Ceratopetalum gummiferum Sm) is a shrubby tree species of the east coast of New South Wales in Australia. It is much prized as a cut flower crop because of its bright, pinky red floral calyces. New varieties are being developed, the storage of which is an important issue. In this study, it was shown that shoot tips sampled from in vitro plantlets withstood cryopreservation using the encapsulation–dehydration technique. The protocol leading to optimal regrowth was the following: excised shoot tips were pretreated for 1 d in the dark on hormone-free Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium with 0.3 M sucrose, then encapsulated in 3% calcium alginate and precultured in liquid MS medium with 0.5 M sucrose for 3 d. Precultured beads were dehydrated for 6 h in the air current of the laminar flow cabinet to 24.3% moisture content (fresh weight basis) before rapid immersion in liquid nitrogen. Under these conditions, regrowth of shoot tips after cryopreservation reached 61.4%. Regrowth of cryopres...

The aims of this study were to (i) test ground and aerial-based remote sensing vegetation indices (VIs) for trait-based breeding line selection, (ii) improve our understanding of the association between measured plant traits and readings derived from active and passive sensors and (iii) establish an optimal time for growth assessments in relation to field pea vigour and seed yield. Multispectral sensors were deployed with the handheld Crop Circle (CC) and a sensor mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to collect data from field trials conducted between 2017 and 2020 at Beulah and Horsham in Victoria and Yenda, Wagga Wagga and Ardlethan in New South Wales in Australia. The result showed that normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from an aerial-based passive sensor (UAV) was strongly and significantly correlated to NDVI derived from a ground-based active sensor (CC) at both Beulah (R2 = 0.85; n = 1165; p < 0.001) and Horsham (R2 = 0.77; n = 210; p < 0.001). Both methods showed similar NDVI trends in pea genotype rankings. Based on the three seasons of field trial data, NDVI derived from both the CC and UAV sensors were linearly related to biomass production during pre-canopy closure growth. In water limiting environments, seed yield was positively correlated to NDVI measures. Measures calculated from the area under the NDVI curve throughout the growth season, and an additive main effect and multiplicative interaction model (AMMI) identified varieties with high vigour scores (high NDVI). Overall, a high vigour score was correlated to seed yield in lower yielding environments. From these results it appeared that higher vigour helps achieve higher yields in drier environments, however it was correlated with lower yields in better environments.

As soon as the post‐war era of rapid economic growth had come to an end in the early 1970s, the intellectural fashion being to swing towards a renewed appreciation of economic growth and the ‘classical’ factors of growth saving hard work, enterprise, innovation and a legal framework which secures the property rights to the rewards of material progress and facilitates flexible adjustment by a competitives system. Professor Wolfgang Kasper of the University of New South Wales in Australia argues that the major challenge for societies in West and East, North and South alike is now to make the supply side of the economy more elastic and responsive to new opparatunities and circumstances.