A. Sobotka and D.P. Wyatt
The paper consists of two parts: the first contains an introduction to building technology of what is known as “sustainable development”, and the second part seeks to apply the…
Abstract
The paper consists of two parts: the first contains an introduction to building technology of what is known as “sustainable development”, and the second part seeks to apply the principles of the “sustainable development” to renovation of large‐sized element buildings.
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D.P. Wyatt, A. Sobotka and M. Rogalska
If sustainable construction is to be secured as a response to sovereign governments’ acknowledgement of global warming, then there is an urgent need to focus on both the built…
Abstract
If sustainable construction is to be secured as a response to sovereign governments’ acknowledgement of global warming, then there is an urgent need to focus on both the built environment’s facility and asset serviceability and service life characteristics and their management. Includes building life management, life based procurement practice together with the product’s associated life care needs. Adopting such a practice would permit and encourage client organisations to actively improve their building stocks and facility portfolios. In a sustainable sense too, both the asset and facility organisations should seek improved building space flexibility and a whole life quality set within some environmental or life cycle measure or benchmark. Pursuing such sustainable goals means that one must also both embrace the respective project’s building material and component supply chain and include its respective waste stream’s impact at that point of the product’s life time including its dismission stage. Finally, both in a sustainability and in a business excellence sense, all organisations need to find ways to bring their respective portfolio into a CO2‐serviceability framework and keep a watching brief on developing their responses to an inevitable carbon based taxation future.
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Gabriel Nani, Isaac Mensah and Theophilus Adjei-Kumi
A major concern for construction professionals at the rural road agency in Ghana is the problem of fixing contract duration for bridge construction projects in rural areas. The…
Abstract
Purpose
A major concern for construction professionals at the rural road agency in Ghana is the problem of fixing contract duration for bridge construction projects in rural areas. The purpose of the study was to develop a tool for construction professionals to forecast duration for bridge projects.
Design/methodology/approach
In all, 100 questionnaires were distributed to professionals at the Department of Feeder Roads to ascertain their views on the work items in a bill of quantities (BOQ) that impact significantly on the duration of bridge construction projects. Historical data for 30 completed bridge projects were also collected from the same Department. The data collected were executed work items in BOQ and actual durations used in completing the works. The qualitative data were analysed using the relative importance index and the quantitative data, processed and analysed using both the stepwise regression method and artificial neural network (ANN) technique.
Findings
The identified predictors, namely, in-situ concrete, weight of prefabricated steel components, gravel sub-base and haulage of aggregates, used as independent variables resulted in the development of a regression model with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 25 per cent and an ANN model with a feed forward back propagation algorithm with an MAPE of 26 per cent at the validation stage. The study has shown that both regression and ANN models are appropriate for predicting the duration of a new bridge construction project.
Research limitations/implications
The predictors used in the developed models are limited to work items in BOQs only of completed bridge construction projects as well as the small sample size.
Practical implications
The study has developed a working tool for practitioners at the agency to forecast contract duration for bridge projects prior to its commencement.
Originality value
The study has quantified the relationship between the work items in BOQs and the duration of bridge construction projects using the stepwise regression method and the ANN techniques.
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Krzysztof Borodako, Jadwiga Berbeka and Michał Rudnicki
The aim of the study is to assess the resilience of tourism enterprises in the face of the pandemic crisis and the war in Ukraine. It was achieved on the base of the results of…
Abstract
The aim of the study is to assess the resilience of tourism enterprises in the face of the pandemic crisis and the war in Ukraine. It was achieved on the base of the results of surveys conducted among Małopolska (Poland) tourism enterprises in the years 2021–2022. The research was conducted using the CAWI technique, it has been collected 517 completed questionnaires. Regression analysis was used to check the relationships between the studied variables. The findings confirm that the surveyed companies react agilely to changing, volatile, uncertain, and complex business conditions. These companies undertook numerous innovative (most often in the scale of the company) solutions in the organisational area. Changes noticed in the behaviour of contractors were also confirmed by constant monitoring of the environment forced by dynamic changes in conditions. Among the factors determining the activities of tourist companies in the context of international factors, one can undoubtedly mention the uncertainty caused by the war in Ukraine (and thus the energy crisis). The research focuses on the important subject of resilience, organisational changes, and agility in adapting to conditions in the face of volatility and uncertainty in the environment.
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Isaac Mensah, Theophilus Adjei-Kumi and Gabriel Nani
Determining the duration for road construction projects represents a problem for construction professionals in Ghana. The purpose of this paper is to develop an artificial neural…
Abstract
Purpose
Determining the duration for road construction projects represents a problem for construction professionals in Ghana. The purpose of this paper is to develop an artificial neural network (ANN) model for determining the duration for rural bituminous surfaced road projects.
Design/methodology/approach
Data for 22 completed bituminous surfaced road projects from the Department of Feeder Roads (rural road agency) were collected and analyzed using the principal component analysis (PCA) and ANN techniques. The data collected were final payment certificates which contained payment bill of quantities (BOQ) of work items executed for the selected completed road projects. The executed quantities in the BOQ were the total quantities of work items for site clearance, earthworks, in-situ concrete, reinforcement, formwork, gravel sub-base/base, bitumen, road line markings and furniture, length of road and actual durations for each of the completed projects. The PCA was first employed to reduce the data in order to identify a smaller number of variables (or significant quantities) that constitute 81.58 percent of the total variance of the collected data. The ANN was then used to develop the network using the identified significant quantities as input variables and the actual durations as output variables.
Findings
The coefficient of correlation (R) and determination (R2) as well as the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) obtained show that construction professionals can use the developed ANN model for determining duration. The study shows that the best neural network is the multi-layer perceptron with a structure 3-38-1 based on a back propagation feed forward algorithm. The developed network produces good results with an MAPE of 17.56 percent or an average accuracy of 82.44 percent.
Research limitations/implications
Apart from the fact that the sample size was small, the developed model does not incorporate the implications of other likely factors that may affect contract duration.
Practical implications
The outcome of this study is to help construction professionals to fix realistic contract duration for road construction projects before signing a contract. Such realistic contract duration would help reduce time overruns as well as the payment of liquidated and ascertained damages by contractors for late completion.
Originality/value
This paper proposes an alternative way of determining the duration for road construction projects using the total quantities of work items in a final payment BOQ. The approach is based on the PCA and ANN model of quantities of work items of completed road projects.
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Research has shown that young adults face strong economic burdens when it comes to establishing their intimate relationships in times of labor market deregulation and economic…
Abstract
Research has shown that young adults face strong economic burdens when it comes to establishing their intimate relationships in times of labor market deregulation and economic recession. However, little is known about possible protective effects of the transition to cohabitation on subjective worries. Based on economic and gender-specific assumptions, the present paper uses data from the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP) from 1991 to 2020. Longitudinal analyses show that the transition into cohabitation reduces the economic worries of German women, especially in times of macroeconomic crisis. For men, cohabitation is only protective against economic worries if they or their partner have high economic resources. The latter may indicate that young men in precarious living situations perceive the male breadwinner model as a subjective burden in the context of cohabitation.
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S. Thomas Ng, Jonathan Shi and Yuan Fang
Many planners and managers prefer to maintain more than enough construction materials on site to avoid valuable labour and plant resources staying idle. Despite the fact that…
Abstract
Purpose
Many planners and managers prefer to maintain more than enough construction materials on site to avoid valuable labour and plant resources staying idle. Despite the fact that minimising the buffer stock would improve the productivity of a construction project, no one likes to take this risk especially when the consequences are not totally clear. This paper aims to identify the possible savings in time and cost due to different amounts of buffer stock on site, by introducing an activity‐based simulation model.
Design/methodology/approach
In this research, details and data of a residential project involving substantial amounts of pre‐cast components are collected. The project participants are asked to unveil the constraints on site and throughout the material delivery and storage processes. Finally, the collected data are fed into the activity‐based construction simulation tool for analysis.
Findings
The results indicate that simulation could help quantify the productivity of resources so as to establish the most suitable strategy for improving the logistics of materials handling in a construction project.
Originality/value
The paper helps construction planners and managers to streamline the flow of construction materials and determine optimal buffer stocks rather than relying on subjective judgement.
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Jaques van Niekerk, Jan Wium and Nico de Koker
Construction projects generate large volumes of data which can be used for better management of projects. In this paper, key project data is manually extracted from project site…
Abstract
Purpose
Construction projects generate large volumes of data which can be used for better management of projects. In this paper, key project data is manually extracted from project site meeting minutes. Knowledge discovery technologies are then used to predict the final project duration of active projects.
Design/methodology/approach
Project planning and effective leadership/governance were identified from literature as the most significant factors that impact the duration of projects. These factors were hence considered as the main features for a data mining process. Items supporting these factors were extracted from site meeting minutes to create a database of 27 civil engineering projects executed over the last ten years. Data mining algorithms were used to predict from this data whether or not an active project will be completed on time.
Findings
The research showed that information from project site meetings can be used to predict final project duration of active projects with accuracy of above 80% when using random forest algorithms from Orange and RapidMiner data mining applications. The value of data to predict project duration from project site meeting minutes is demonstrated but it only becomes practically useable if the format of minutes is suitably standardised.
Practical implications
Some of the data mining algorithms provided accuracies of above 80% in predicting final project duration and proved the value of project data from site meeting minutes. The random forest algorithms are particularly suited to this type of data. The factors with the highest impact on the prediction of the project duration are those related to the progress of the project.
Originality/value
This study for the first time shows that data from site meeting minutes of past and current projects can be used to make accurate predictions of final project duration of active projects and serve as a project management tool to activate remedial measures.
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This chapter sets out to examine the topic of a spatial analysis of urban crime through an analysis of David Simon’s seminal television series The Wire. By developing an analysis…
Abstract
This chapter sets out to examine the topic of a spatial analysis of urban crime through an analysis of David Simon’s seminal television series The Wire. By developing an analysis of the issues that are presented in the series, issues such as race, ethnicity and representation will be addressed in order to add to the understanding of these topics in relation to race and media representations. Each section will address a set of themes which are evident in The Wire. The chapter highlights the idea of race in the series and how characters are presented on screen. The research is also concerned with economic issues depicted in the series and the effect of the economy on the characters in Baltimore, the U.S. city in which The Wire was set.
The conclusion of the chapter addresses poverty class and inequality as topics and sets out to document these themes in relation to race. The third chapter also discusses the racism and discrimination that is apparent in The Wire. By contextualising the series, the book is attempting to theorise relevant issues surrounding race, gender and power through an examination of relevant literature and the development of a theoretical framework from which key issues will be addressed.
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The vast bulk of the discourse surrounding reproduction is centered on women. Yet, the rate of childlessness in the United Kingdom (and much of the world) is higher among men…
Abstract
The vast bulk of the discourse surrounding reproduction is centered on women. Yet, the rate of childlessness in the United Kingdom (and much of the world) is higher among men. Recently, there has been an increased focus on fatherhood and fathering in academia, policy, practice, and the general media. However, data on men who do not become fathers has been excluded and their experiences minimized and dismissed. Infertility research has shown that failure to achieve the high social status of parenthood has the similar effects on mental and physical health as a diagnosis of life-threatening illness. In this chapter, I will draw on two qualitative research studies to show how not achieving the pronatalist ideal of parenthood impacts on men’s identity, sense of self, behaviors, health and well-being and social networks across the life course. The workplace is an arena where people who do not fit socio-cultural norms and expectations are overtly and/or covertly stigmatized and discriminated against through policy, working practices and everyday interaction between groups and individuals. I will argue that failing to acknowledge men’s experience of non-reproduction has a significant impact on both individuals and institutions alike.