Project requirements indicate specific works, events, or conditions that should be fulfilled to ensure the construction project success within planned budgets and times. To effectively manage project ...requirements, requirement prioritization allows for the proper allocation of limited project resources by determining the relative importance and urgency of different requirements. However, because project requirements are typically communicated through textual data in documents, the current approach to prioritizing requirements heavily relies on individuals’ expertise, practical knowledge, and experiences. This subjective judgment-based process poses a challenge in ensuring consistent and reliable prioritization, because there may be variations in practitioners’ prioritization results. Moreover, a large amount of text in documents can complicate capturing significant requirements within limited bidding times. To address these issues, this study proposes a novel method using historical data analysis and computational techniques. This study adopts historical change orders in order to evaluate impact levels of adjusted work items during construction and natural language processing (NLP) techniques, which enable the automated classification of requirements by the most-related work items. This study conducts a case study by examining documents from resurfacing projects and validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. It will also provide a cornerstone for a smarter review and understanding of project documentation and improved decision-making for project planning.
Academics and practitioners have paid close attention to front-end planning research, especially in the construction industry. It is known with many acronyms including pre-project planning and ...front-end loading. Since 1994, Construction Industry Institute (CII) has set front-end planning as one of the main research topic areas in their knowledge structure. A lot of research related to front-end planning and project scope definition has been conducted since then. However, there lacks a comprehensive review of the current studies on the topic. Thus, the objective of this research was to undertake a comprehensive literature review of papers related to front-end planning. Reviewing 83 selected papers, this research raises several important issues regarding front-end planning such as the position of front-end planning in project life cycle, the differentiation between front-end planning and project planning, the significance of front-end planning, the front-end planning organization management, the front-end planning phases, the challenges in front-end planning implementation, and the identification of research gaps in front-end planning. The findings of this research contribute to further understanding of front-end planning and would be useful for practitioners and academics to conduct further empirical studies on the subject matter.
In the past decade, many efforts have been devoted to exploring the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for Green Building (GB) projects. However, there is absence of a systematic review exploring these ...studies. Therefore, the paper presents a comprehensive review of publications from 2005 to 2018 on CSFs for GB projects. The results indicate there is a growing interest in the exploration of CSFs for GB projects since 2010. The main contributing contributors, institutions, countries and areas, as well as research methods in this area are summarized. The mostly identified CSFs for GB projects are “communication and cooperation between project participants”, “effective project planning and control”, “owner's involvement and commitment”, “clear goals and objectives” and “project manager's performance”. The contractors and owners were found more related to these identified CSFs. Finally, knowledge gaps are discussed and future research directions including: (1) more studies on relationships between the CSFs; (2) extending studies to cover all building types; (3) more investigation on CSFs for different project objectives; (4) more emphasis on how to implement CSFs for GB projects are proposed. The results could offer a favorable reference for researchers to obtain a thorough picture of the current research woks and facilitate further study in this area. The discussion of GB CSFs could also broaden the understanding of the best ways for implementing GB projects to practitioners thereby reducing the setbacks towards its implementation.
•Studies on Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for green building projects were systematically reviewed.•Our focus was to review papers published from 2005 to 2018.•Most adopted research methods in this field were presented.•CSFs of green building projects in previous researches and their related project stakeholders were identified and discussed.•Future research directions in green building projects were proposed.
•A novel PDM matrix is proposed to model agile software development projects.•A novel EPR algorithm proposed to specify the best n probable project scenarios.•The proposed EPR algorithm specifies the ...best n feasible project structures.•The EPR determines how to restructure a project plan if management claims change.
This paper proposes a new matrix-based project planning method that takes into consideration task importance or probability of completions thus determines and ranks the importance or probability of possible project scenarios and project structures. The proposed algorithm is fast, aims to select the most important project scenarios or the least cost/time demanding project structures. The algorithm is generic, can host several types of goals dictated by the characteristics of project management and as such can be the fundamental element of a project expert- and decision-making system.
Source code size is exercised as input to numerous parametric software estimation models. But it is rarely presented at the initial phase of software development. For software project planning, ...accurately determining the software size estimation at the early stage is a very important parameter. This paper aims to provide a basis for estimating the software size at the early stage of the software development process through a systematic review of previous works. The authors have reviewed the current techniques of size estimation to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
EIA Follow-Up in the UK — A 2015 Update Jones, Robert; Fischer, Thomas B.
Journal of environmental assessment policy and management,
03/2016, Volume:
18, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
EIA is globally recognised and implemented as a decision making support instrument in project planning. Whilst it should be involved in both, pre-development consent deliberations as well as in ...subsequent phases, including post construction, in practice, follow-up is often deficient. In this paper, a review of how follow-up is dealt with in UK environmental statement non-technical summaries is presented. Furthermore, opinions of UK EIA practitioners with regards to current practices and barriers and possible implications of the new EC EIA Directive from 2014 are discussed. Comparing results with earlier publications, an overall minor positive change in follow-up practices in the UK is identified and three main barriers for improved follow-up are established: (1) lack of appropriate legislation, (2) implementation costs, and (3) lack of enforcement. The latter may still be the number one reason for continued deficient practice, even when the new EIA Directive is implemented.
Construction, by the nature of the work, is more accident-prone than other industries despite advancements in improving safety performance. Proactive mitigation and assessment of the safety ...performance of construction projects remain challenging due to the difficulty of acquiring, storing, and using data to produce accurate predictive models. This research focused on devising methods that allow decision makers to leverage existing data in the planning phase to streamline the development of predictive models. A data-driven approach to predict the probability of a safety incident occurring in a given construction project and within a novel discipline-level schedule is presented. By implementing the proposed model, decision makers can evaluate and mitigate the risk of a given project incident occurring by deploying discipline-level safety policies in the planning phase and modifying the schedule accordingly. A predictive model was developed based on selected safety-related metrics extracted from a data set comprising daily payroll data and incident reports, which represent 28 million working hours within eight different industrial construction projects in Canada. The model was implemented in a case study based on an industrial project to demonstrate the framework’s functionality and practical utility during the project planning phase. The results show that the revised safe plan can be achieved by incorporating safety considerations in the planning phase.
Coastal Ecosystem Values, Threats, and Decline Coastal wetlands, such as seagrass beds, mangrove wetlands, salt marshes, macroalgal, and seaweed beds, shellfish reefs, tidal freshwater wetlands, and ...coral reefs, are remarkable features of tropical and temperate coastlines. ...these systems are subject to what may be called “a triple whammy” of increasing industrialization and urbanization, an increased loss of biological and physical resources (fish, water, energy, space), and a decreased resilience to the consequences of a warming climate and sea level rise (Elliott et al., 2016). Trans-Disciplinary Teams Looking forward into the next decade, coastal habitat restoration will truly require a trans-disciplinary approach with skills drawn from engineering, modeling, ecology, chemistry, hydrology, social sciences including economics, financial, and project planning, governance, and integrated land, and sea spatial planning and management. Coastal ecosystems are at least as complex as terrestrial ecosystems, although arguably more dynamic, with the added gravity of the “triple whammy”—future development expansion that further alters shoreline ecosystems, loss of biodiversity and environmental conditions (e.g., water quality), and changing climate which alters sea level in many complex ways.
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