Building Information Modelling continues to grow in importance in construction research and practice. Demian and Walters study the application of BIM specifically to information management. Construction is information-intensive and problems such as ‘information overload’ are often documented. They apply principles from ‘lean thinking’ to measure the information flows through a BIM system, compared to more traditional information management platforms: Enterprise Resource Planning, a construction extranet and classic email. They collected their data from an off-site precast concrete fabrication facility supplying precast parts to medium-scale public sector projects in the UK. In their findings, email appears to be irreplaceable as a communication medium, often facilitating contextual communication to supplement other communication channels when such channels are available. Still, BIM seems to draw information traffic away from the extranet system. This work can have implications for the IT investment choices made by construction organizations. The value emerges of linking as much information as possible to the model of the facility being constructed.
In construction projects different stakeholders may wish to influence the project outcome. Storvang and Clarke investigate how stakeholders with very different backgrounds and interests can be involved in construction projects to understand each other’s values, needs, concerns and gain new ideas. They bring new insight into methods on facilitation of processes to overcome challenges and uncertainties when involving stakeholders in construction. The authors have conducted a case study relating to the construction of environmentally-friendly guesthouses at the Danish island, Samsoe. Action research is applied based on three workshops, interviews and observations. The authors shows that meetings and communication between stakeholders can be facilitated using a socio-technical space to gather insights from diverse stakeholders in the early stage of construction. The socio-technical space forms a framework for how meetings and dialogue between stakeholders and professionals can be facilitated to overcome some of the many barriers that exists for stakeholder involvement. The discussions lead to a model of what happens in the process when involving different stakeholders. The authors also shows how boundary objects are important to facilitate dialog and negotiation between stakeholders in order for them to understand each other’s values, needs, concerns.
In the management of facilities, there is a strategic choice to be made between maintenance issues and capital renewal requirements. An imbalance between these may contribute to the increasing pressures on facility managers. Failure to balance resources may result in additional expenses to facility owners. Lavy, Garcia, Scinto and Dixit propose a platform to simulate dynamic, complex facility performance outputs. They focus on K-12 school facilities in the USA and use a simulation tool to analyse several scenarios, which enables them to establish relationships between the various input and output variables. The simulations reveal that the early replacement approach would be the best strategy if the owner’s goal is to achieve the overall lowest life-cycle costs. However, a full maintenance programme should be preferred if the goal is to keep a building at the highest possible condition along its service life. The authors argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, generalization is not possible in such cases since owners need to consider a very large number of variables in their decision-making process. The simulation platform helps building owners in making these decisions. As long as consequences and risks are understood and agreed upon, there is no ‘right or wrong’ solution for prioritizing the limited resources allocated for building maintenance and capital renewal.
Reliable forecasting for aggregate demand for construction is of vital importance to developers, builders and policy-makers. But regional forecasting techniques have rarely been applied to a group of interconnected regions. Jiang and Liu introduce a panel vector error correction approach to model and forecast demand for six states and two territories in Australia by using quarterly state-level panel data collected from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Both long-run and causal links between regional construction demand and key macroeconomic indicators are examined, suggesting that changes in regional construction demand would lead to a short-term effect in the growth of economy. An immediate and negative association is found between regional construction prices and demand. The empirical estimates reveal disparities among regional markets and suggest that construction developers and investors need to invest and plan carefully in Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania. Changes of construction demand in these states may be highly affected by these local speculative investment activities. By comparison, the proposed forecasting model outperforms conventional forecasting models and provides more reliable forecasts of demand for Australian regional construction markets. The panel vector error correction model can be used as a tool to analyse disparities among regional construction markets and assist industry stakeholders and policy-makers in adjusting their business and development strategy based on the projected results.
Naderpajouh and Hastak frame the idea of complex construction projects as a System of Systems (SoS). Their purpose is to address the paradox of poor performance of these projects, despite their increasing complexity. Increasing complexity of projects should be related to enhance their robustness in: (i) sustaining the increasing demand for service of these projects, and (ii) sustaining the contextual fluctuation in terms of social, environmental, and economical dimensions. For example, several financial institutions are engaged in projects to enhance their economic sustainability; transnational actors to ensure environmental sustainability; and community groups and non-governmental organizations (NGO) to ensure social sustainability of projects. However, in the literature of the systems theory, increasing complexity is seen to result in fragility in the form of cascading failures. As a result, construction projects face emergent risks such as those associated with the interaction of institutionally diverse actors. The authors frame projects as a complex system of systems and define interactions in the context of projects as power relations. They deal with (i) developing the equilibria of interactions based on the concept of bargaining games, (ii) framing the equilibria of interactions based on the literature of social power, and (iii) simulate them for quantitative and descriptive analysis of emergent risks in complex construction projects. Common public policies are modelled and analysed to demonstrate the application of the method in sustainable infrastructure development.