• Title/Summary/Keyword: Engineering Construction

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Quantification of the CO2 Footprint in Residential Construction

  • Don Mah;Juan D. Manrique;Haitao Yu;Mohamed Al-Hussein;Reza Nasseri
    • International conference on construction engineering and project management
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    • 2009.05a
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    • pp.525-536
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    • 2009
  • The current residential process adheres to a traditional method of construction involving wood framing on-site on poured concrete foundations which has been widely applied in North America. A conventional residential construction process can include seventeen distinct stages ranging from stake-out to pre-occupancy inspection. The current practice possesses short comings including high construction material wastes, long scheduling timelines, adverse weather conditions, poor quality, low efficiencies and negative environmental impacts from transportation and equipment use. Over CAN $5 billion dollars was spent in the construction sector during 2007 in Canada. Previous findings in CO2 emissions during the construction process of a conventional dwelling emphasize more than 45 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Hence, in Alberta alone during 2007, almost 50,000 residential units would release more than two million tonnes of CO2. These numbers demonstrate the economical and environmental impact in building construction and its relationship with CO2 emissions. The aim of this paper is to quantify the CO2 emissions from the current residential construction process in order to establish the baseline for CO2 emission reduction opportunities. The quantification collection methodology will be approached by identifying the seventeen various stages of construction and quantifying the contributions of CO2 from specific activities and their impacts of work for each stage. The approach of separating these into separate stages for collection will allow for independent opportunities for analysis from various independent contractors from the entire scope of work. The use of BIM will be implemented to efficiently quantify CO2 emissions. Based on the CO2 quantification baseline, emission reduction opportunities such as an industrialized construction process will be introduced that allows homebuilders to reduce the environmental and economical impact of home construction while enabling them to produce higher quality, more energy efficient homes in a safer and shorter period of time.

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Risk Ranking for Tunnelling Construction Projects in Malaysia

  • Ghazali, F.E. Mohamed;Wong, H.C.
    • Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management
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    • v.4 no.1
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    • pp.29-36
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    • 2014
  • Tunnelling has become a preferred method of construction for road and highway projects in countries with a lot of hilly slope geological conditions such as found in Malaysia. However the construction works of a tunnelling project are usually complicated and costly, which consequently impose great risks to the parties involved. This paper identifies the key significant risks and sub-risks for tunnelling construction projects in Malaysia through a case study. Interview has been used as the solitary means to determine the significant risks from contractor's eleven key project personnel who were directly involved in the tunnelling construction such as consultant, construction manager and tunnel engineers. The importance of the risks identified is then prioritised and ranked via the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)'s pairwise comparison approach to determine their criticality towards a successful delivery of project. As a result, three key risks have been identified as significant for the tunnelling case study project, namely health and safety, cost overrun in construction and time overrun in construction. Two sub-risks each of the latter categories, which are cost underestimation and unforeseen events (cost overrun in construction) as well as plant and machinery failure and delay in material delivery (time overrun in construction), have occupied the top five overall risk ranking.

Problems Related to Construction and Building Materials in Libya

  • Salah, Abuzaid;Bloomer, Steve
    • Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management
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    • v.4 no.4
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    • pp.1-8
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    • 2014
  • The broad aim of this paper is to provide a detailed understanding of the post-war problems associated with materials for reconstruction in Libya, and to identify key problems and obstructions. Theoretical and empirical studies are being conducted in Libya. The theoretical study focuses on materials for construction and the key issues such as sources, transport and storage of materials, as well as their impact on the national economy, the nation's socio-economic development and the environment. This empirical study employed questionnaires, observations and a series of interviews with researchers, academics, suppliers and manufacturers, supported by the researcher's three decades of experience of working in the construction industry and its associated processes and operations. The empirical study illustrated that materials for post-disaster reconstruction in Libya suffer from external problems related to policies and decision-making in terms of availability of materials, fluctuation of prices of materials, specifications, building codes, legislation and regulations, and internal problems related to the construction and building material's key players: construction companies, consultancy firms, manufacturers and suppliers.

Success Factors of Highway Construction Projects in Egypt: AHP Approach

  • El-Maaty, Ahmed Ebrahim Abu;El-Hamrawy, Saad;Akal, Ahmed Yousry
    • Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management
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    • v.6 no.4
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    • pp.7-14
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    • 2016
  • While the idea of the existence of a set of key factors for success in planning, designing and construction of projects is not new, it remains one of the most important issues in the field of construction management. This is due to project success factors are inputs to project management practice which can lead directly or indirectly to project success. This study identifies the success factors which can be used for improving the highway projects performance in Egypt during the project pre-construction and construction phases. Through a detailed literature review 35 success factors are identified. Furthermore, the AHP is adopted to prioritize the studied factors through the application of questionnaire survey. The study establishes that implementing an effective quality control and assurance systems, allow sufficient time for feasibility studies, design, drawing and tender preparation, effective cost control system and frequency of project budget updates, preparing adequate designs and drawings and determining sufficient time to implement the desired scope of work are the most important success factors for enhancing the highway projects performance in Egypt.

Demystifying the Definition of Digital Twin for Built Environment

  • Davari, Saman;Shahinmoghadam, Mehrzad;Motamedi, Ali;Poirier, Erik
    • International conference on construction engineering and project management
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    • 2022.06a
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    • pp.1122-1129
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    • 2022
  • The concept of Digital Twin (DT) has been receiving an increasing amount of attention in the construction management and building engineering research domains. Although the benefits of DT are evident, confusion with regards to the concept of DTs and its relationship with others such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Internet of Things (IoT) remains. This paper aims to help allay this confusion through an in-depth analysis of the definition of DT and its unique characteristics. As such, a review of the past and current definitions of DT and CPS in various domains is performed. An analysis is then conducted to identify the overlaps between the definition of DT with CPS, as well as with BIM and IoT. Finally, given the relatively closer resemblances between DT and CPS, a set of four distinct dimensions enabling their comparative analysis and highlighting their shared and unique characteristics is discussed. This paper contributes to the existing literature by exploring the definition of DT and presenting two original conceptualizations that help further refine the concept of DT in the construction and management and building engineering domain.

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