• Proceedings of the Korean Institute Of Construction Engineering and Management
• /
• autumn
• /
• pp.73-81
• /
• 2003

The construction industry has been experiencing a major challenge in its work force, 'the shortage of skilled craft workers.' This problem has been caused by several factors such as the poor image of the construction industry, lack of training and education, unclear career path, declining wages, and changing work force demographics. A 'step-change' approach called the 'Two-Tier Work Force Strategy' has been proposed by the Center for Construction Industry Studies (CCIS) to deal with the work force related issues in a radical way. It is composed of two separate strategies, Tier I and II. The Tier I strategy uses less skilled and task trained craft workers, and has a larger administrative site management team than the Tier II strategy. The Tier II strategy utilizes fewer, better-educated, and higher skilled workers who perform some lower-management functions in addition to craft functions. They are paid more, but produce more through higher skills, stay on the job longer through multi-skilling, and deliver improved project performance in safety, quality, schedule, and cost The Two-Tier Work Force Strategy has the potential to resolve the current work force problems and foster a better work force environment in the future.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.10 no.4
• /
• pp.1481-1500
• /
• 2016

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication underlaying macro-small cell networks, as one of the promising technologies in the era of 5G, is able to improve spectral efficiency and increase system capacity. In this paper, we model the cross- and co-tier D2D communications in two-tier macro-small cell networks. To avoid the complicated interference for cross-tier D2D, we propose a mode selection scheme with a dedicated resource sharing strategy. For co-tier D2D, we formulate a joint optimization problem of power control and resource reuse with the aim of maximizing the overall outage capacity. To solve this non-convex optimization problem, we devise a heuristic algorithm to obtain a suboptimal solution and reduce the computational complexity. System-level simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can provide enhanced system performance and guarantee the quality-of-service (QoS) of all devices in two-tier macro-small cell networks. In addition, our study reveals the high potential of introducing cross- and co-tier D2D in small cell networks: i) cross-tier D2D obtains better performance at low and medium small cell densities than co-tier D2D, and ii) co-tier D2D achieves a steady performance improvement with the increase of small cell density.