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The purpose of this paper is to develop a multi-agent-based model for quantitatively measuring how the design change management strategies improve project performance.

Based on questionnaires and interviews, this paper investigates the coordination mechanism of risks due to design changes in prefabricated construction (PC) projects. Combined with all the variables related with design change risks, a multi-agent-based simulation model is proposed to evaluate the design change management effect.

The coordination mechanism between design change factors, design change events, risk consequence and management strategy in PC projects is described and then the simulation-based design change management mechanism in PC projects is used to assess the effect of management strategies under dynamic scenarios.

PC projects have rapidly increased in recent years due to the advantages of fast construction, high quality and labor savings. Different from traditional on-site construction, the impact and risk from design changes are likely to be greater due to the prefabricated project being multi-stage, highly interactive and complex. The simulations presented in this paper make it possible to test different design change management strategies in order to study their effectiveness and support managerial decision making.

The purpose of this article is to describe the application of brand building techniques to an existing organization.

The article describes an application of relationship building to increase the success of a service in a competitive environment.

Relationship building strategies have been effective in forming bonds between customers and service and product marketers. They can be effective in many industries and can be highly effective in competitive situations. Instituting a relationship building strategy in a bar helped differentiate the service and attract consumers with relatively high lifetime customer value. By insuring that each type of relationship bond was implemented, the organization gained strong relationships with a group of customers which proved resistant to competitive inroads.

As in all case studies, the specific conditions found in one organization may not be found more generally in others. Readers are cautioned that the conclusions drawn may have limited applicability.

The work illustrates the strategy that a service provider may use to bolster customer relationships and gain the benefits that provide barriers to entry by competitors.

The work describes how tactics and a strategic shift, focusing on specific segments, can earn a service provider a measure of success.

The student will examine from a systemic perspective qualitative information from a company to propose improvements to its business model.

After working for more than 10 years with a global company, in January 2006 the Guadalajara-based jewelry SME, Divine Jewelry Co. (DJC), was facing liquidity problems, overstock and a debt from a bank loan, among others. The planned expansion of DJC, a family business founded in 1980, had resulted in just the opposite. Daniel, the owner and CEO of DJC, was determined to reverse the company's precarious situation as soon as possible. Some of the questions he asked himself centered on what actions he should take to pay off liabilities and try to survive in the industry his business had held a place in for 25 years. Daniel wondered whether, to pay off debts and have sufficient liquidity to have working capital and move forward, it would be enough to make efforts to recover those clients they had stopped serving, along with getting new ones. In addition, he thought it was necessary to formulate a plan to use the remaining proceeds from the sale of the property if they had to dispose of it. The case is about analyzing the strategic management of a company, specifically its business model, considering the context of its industry. The case also illustrates the problems that arise from focusing on serving a single client.

The case “Divine Jewelry Co: From Expansion to Survival” has been designed to be used by university students in initial management or strategic management courses on the following topics: Business modelsPorter's Five Forces ModelFormulation of strategies

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS11: Strategy.

This study assesses the effects of junior enterprises (JEs) on the entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of engineering higher education students, compared to a group of social sciences students.

This research analyses a sample of 132 students enrolled in engineering higher education courses in Portugal and Brazil, while 83 of the respondents being involved in a JE and 49 not. The authors compare this group to another group of 176 social sciences students from several higher education courses, while 93 being enrolled in JE and 83 not.

The results show that students enrolled in JEs show higher levels of entrepreneurial intention (EI), as well as their antecedents such as attitude towards the behaviour (ATB), perceived behavioural control (PBC) and social norms (SN) , and the impact of this extracurricular activity is higher on engineering students than on social sciences students. Also, country and gender differences were found in some variables.

Further studies are needed to confirm the results in a broader population and in other countries. Also, the study addressed attitudes and intentions but not actual behaviour due to the time lag problem. There is also the risk of self-reported bias on the answers due to social desirability bias, for example. Finally, because JEs have their own recruitment process, there is a possible “self-selection problem” of students who might have previously developed some of entrepreneurial attitudes and skills assessed by the questionnaire.

The results have important implications for engineering higher education institutions. Despite many of them provide entrepreneurship training courses, they should also encourage students to join extracurricular activities or even create their own at their institution to complement their skills' development. Also, teachers should be encouraged to integrate these activities into their subjects, avoiding a major barrier to the participation in extracurricular activities which is the students' time constraints. Finally, participation in extracurricular activities can be promoted by institutions in many ways, such as allowing students to obtain academic credits or through supporting financially or logistically the organisations that promote these activities.

This study contributes to the discussion on how to promote the development of entrepreneurial competences in young people that soon will enter the labour market.

This study contributes to the discussions on the value of extracurricular activities, such as the enrolment in JEs, to the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and intention on the training of the next generation of engineers capable of facing future worlds' challenges.

The aim of this paper is to present a systematic approach to provide decision makers in the Taipei City Government and private developers with an opportunity to review their decisions on urban renewal project selections, and to provide a model which could be adapted for other locations.

Porter's diamond model of competitive advantage is applied to establish evaluating criteria on urban competitiveness quality, and a fuzzy set theory combining the PROMETHEE method is used to determine the priority of projects. In assigning scores for urban sustainability, the expected return for each project is calculated for the economic dimension and a subjective scale has been used for the social and environmental dimensions. Genetic algorithms (GA) are introduced to search optimal solutions considering cost‐score tradeoffs for decisions on investment ratio determination and renewal type selection. The proposed approach is tested by evaluating 13 urban renewal projects in Taipei City.

The three‐stage model proposed by this study has established a comprehensive and systematic approach that considers key factors in urban renewal, assesses renewal projects from the standpoint of urban competitiveness and sustainability, and provides decision makers with helpful guidelines for investment.

There is difficulty in re‐examining social and environmental issues of the city government's earlier decisions became decision makers did not fully consider these two issues at the beginning of the planning stage, which is a limitation of this research.

The results documented in the paper provide many other cities facing similar renewal decision problems with insightful strategies and useful implications.

The present paper aims to characterize the fatigue crack propagation behavior of wheel and rail steels, in particular the AVE wheel steel and an UIC60 rail steel, including several R-values and near threshold behavior. To accomplish this objective, mode I fatigue crack growth tests were performed according to the ASTM E647 standard on C(T) specimens taken from a Spanish high-speed AVE train used wheel and a UIC60 rail, tested with 0.1, 0.4 and 0.7 load ratios.

In the present study, the two different methodologies presented in the ASTM E647 standard were used to characterize the fatigue crack propagation behavior of the two studied materials. The K-decreasing test procedure was used to characterize fatigue crack propagation near the threshold, whereas the K-increasing with constant load range method was used in the Paris law regime.

It was observed that for the wheel a small influence of R-ratio was found, with greater R implying higher fatigue crack growth rates. For the rail, the influence is small, and for large values of ΔK, it is slightly reversed. The near-threshold results obtained indicate lower threshold values for higher R-ratio, a fact that is possibly associated with crack closure phenomena. A scanning electron microscope (SEM) study of fatigue crack propagation surfaces identified a random behavior in the striation orientation for both materials and no correlation was found between striation spacing and actual fatigue crack growth rate.

R-ratio and threshold behavior of fatigue crack propagation of a steel used in high-speed train wheels, as well as of UIC60 rail steel, were studied, with the objective of generating data to be used in maintenance and damage tolerance models.

The paper's purpose is to describe and examine the level of utilisation of construction enterprise information systems (CEIS) and to identify critical success factors and benefits from their implementation.

A survey was conducted to quantify the current situation of CEIS. The population consisted of stakeholders with reliable working knowledge of their firms' information systems. Statistical tests were conducted to draw conclusions from the data.

A total of 48 per cent of the firms use enterprise resource planning packages, but only 4 per cent of these firms chose to implement the project management modules that are commercially available. Only 16 per cent of the respondents were satisfied with their current level of integration due to CEIS. There was no evidence to suggest a tendency for the integration level due to CEIS to increase together with the business geographical dispersion.

The rate of response to the survey was low (9 per cent), maybe due to the unavailability of CEIS in all the firms that were contacted. Further, research is needed to study the dynamics between management practices and their effect on CEIS adoption and level of integration.

Integration efforts and software that are currently in use still do not fully address the concerns of industry practitioners. Associations found between the level of integration and project characteristics can be used to help IT stakeholders decide on the CEIS functions to adopt.

The strategic, operational and organizational benefits found from the implementation of CEIS are based on current data obtained from a targeted survey of construction related firms.

As more owners seek to develop sustainable buildings, the construction industry is adapting to new requirements in order to meet owners' concerns. Recently, a significant change in the construction industry has been the increased interest in sustainable materials. Sustainable materials are the potential resource to mitigate the impact on the environment and bring significant economic, social, and environmental benefits. For an efficient materials selection process, the content of information should match decision makers' needs and requirements. Although the availability of various information sources on sustainable materials is increasing, researchers have not agreed upon a clear designation, often leading to imprecise definition of the term and its usage. This paper seeks to address these issues.

This study attempts to understand sustainability by concentrating on how this term is reflected in construction materials' images and perceived by design and construction students and practitioners. A measurement instrument is developed based on a literature review and further tested with web‐based evaluation of brick to measure user‐based assessment of product sustainability.

Results of exploratory factor analysis are used to refine the instrument and indicate the main sustainability factors which may be used as guidelines for information developers to present suitable information in materials' databases.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how perceptions may affect decision making to increase the understanding of issues affecting knowledge in product sustainability and awareness of sustainable materials.

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework to assess the feasibility of fuel cells in both monetary and non‐monetary terms. It aims to develop an index is to compare different sources of energy in the residential market of the rural Appalachian region of the USA.

An index is developed to measure sustainable criteria and the factors that influence the user's decision‐making process of adopting an alternative energy. The sustainable criteria are obtained through a literature review, and the factors that influenced the decision‐making process are found through surveys to individuals who may potentially adopt alternative energies. After the index is developed, it is used to compare fuel cells and the conventional grid system using the specific case of a typical rural house.

The most relevant sustainable criteria found in literature are environmental impact, energy consumption, and cost. The factors that influenced the user's decision to adopt an alternative energy are cost, environmental impact, space, reliability, and safety. Those factors are combined in an index used to compare fuel cells and the coal‐fired grid system. According to the index, fuel cells have a slightly better rating than the grid system powered by a coal‐fired power plant; however, further development of fuel cells will be needed in order to be fully competitive.

The index developed is based on the rural Appalachian region of the USA. If the index is used in other locations, factors, and weights should be adjusted accordingly.

The framework discussed in the paper includes both the sustainable performance of the system, and the factors that influenced the user's decision to adopt an alternative energy. The latter has previously not been taken into consideration in the assessment of these types of technologies.

The factors considered in the paper will make a significant difference if alternative energies are to be considered as a viable alternative to traditional energy forms. The framework took a holistic approach, and considered factors such as cost, environment, energy consumption, reliability, maintenance, space and safety, that are deemed important by the final user.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a tool that supports an investment strategy aimed at improving the energy performance of existing buildings. It is particularly aimed at large building portfolios, such as encountered on university and corporate campuses, where typically a plethora of potential refurbishment interventions are candidates for a greening effort.

The investment optimization strategy is implemented in a web‐based software tool. Under a chosen financial constraint and investment time horizon, the tool empowers campus facility management to make the difficult “greening” decisions as part of their continuous building commissioning. The tool calculates and accepts user data that reflect different types of risks, posed by uncertainties in investment costs, energy performance, and energy cost scenarios. In addition, decision makers (DMs) can set different investment priorities, reflecting their financial risk attitude and commitment to “greenness”.

The tool helps DMs determine the best investment options from a set of available energy efficiency improvement options in the light of expected long range energy costs. It will enable the choice of the optimal mix of technologies and buildings within a given budget limit and predict the long‐term monetary as well as “green” return on investment.

The tool has been tested on a portfolio of campus buildings, but needs further validation with a larger set of buildings in a real life campus management setting. The tool can become a trusted instrument in the hands of portfolio managers faced with the problem to select the optimal mix of technologies, and buildings within the given budget. It should be noted that “investment returns (IRs)” and “commitment to greenness” are just two elements considered in the broader decision making framework of portfolio energy management.

The investment tool can provide an essential instrument for campus managers who are faced with the task to refurbish buildings in their portfolio to increase their energy performance. In the current business culture of campus management, the decision to investment in energy savings needs to be weighed against competing initiatives that target greener campuses. The target of the research was to develop an instrument that can help DMs to verify rapidly what can be achieved if a budget line item of, say $10 million would be added to the campus budget for energy performance improvements.

The research output from this paper is valuable for continued efforts in the development of indicators that measure “IRs” and “commitment to greenness”. Other elements that impact portfolio decision making can be identified in a common decision framework of which the investment tool will become an integral part over time.