June-Seong Yi

A suggested color scheme for reducing perception-related accidents on construction work sites.

Changes in workforce demographics have led to the need for more sophisticated approaches to addressing the safety requirements of the construction industry. Despite extensive research in other industry domains, the construction industry has been passive in exploring the impact of a color scheme; perception-related accidents have been effectively diminished by its implementation. The research demonstrated that the use of appropriate color schemes could improve the actions and psychology of workers on site, thereby increasing their perceptions of potentially dangerous situations. As a preliminary study, the objects selected by rigorous analysis on accident reports were workwear, safety net, gondola, scaffolding, and safety passage. The colors modified on site for temporary facilities were adopted from existing theoretical and empirical research that suggests the use of certain colors and their combinations to improve visibility and conspicuity while minimizing work fatigue. The color schemes were also tested and confirmed through two workshops with workers and managers currently involved in actual projects. The impacts of color schemes suggested in this paper are summarized as follows. First, the color schemes improve the conspicuity of facilities with other on site components, enabling workers to quickly discern and orient themselves in their work environment. Secondly, the color schemes have been selected to minimize the visual work fatigue and monotony that can potentially increase accidents.

A Comparative Study on the Life Cycle Cost of Wall Type Apartment and Beam-Column Structural Apartment

Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) promote long-life housing to reduce social costs generated by poorly considered rebuilding and extend the life-span of housing. Long-life housing has advantages of durability, floor plan variability, efficient maintenance and ease of remodeling because it is a beam-column structure building. However, long-life housing requires somewhat higher initial construction cost than wall type apartments. It makes increase of long-life housing more difficult. In this study, we compare between wall-type apartment and beam-column structure apartment from Life-Cycle Cost`s viewpoint. As a result of the study, long-life housing incurs 18% higher initial cost than wall type apartment, but is 7% more economical than wall type apartment in terms of Life Cycle Cost. Therefore, it is shown that long-life housing could be a beneficial alternative to traditional wall type apartments.

Understanding Collaborative Working Processes within Construction Project Teams Using Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation

Collaborative processes among team members including communication, coordination, and information-handling processes either during pre-construction or project execution are required in order to accomplish the objectives of construction projects. However, current construction management practice does not explicitly take the effect of organizational aspects on project performance into account. This paper introduces a method to understand collaborative processes in an explicit and systematic fashion. An agent-based simulation of collaborative working processes within construction project teams was designed from game theory perspective and implemented. The simulation produced both individual behavior and network dynamics. Individuals represented as agents made efforts to improve performance by communication and coordinating with other members, and overall team network was emerged as a result of interactions among members. Interestingly, it was found that the tendency of forming cohesive subgroups increased when sustaining relations with between-group partners incurs higher cost. The primary contribution of this paper is that it presented an explicit approach to examining collaborative working processes in construction project teams and it extended existing computational organization and network studies by integrating individual behavior models and network models. Keyword : Construction Management, Project Organizations, Collaboration, Computer Simulation

Implementing Activity-based LCA Model for Carbon Dioxide Emission Analysis and Allocation of Environment Cost

As worldwide efforts to reduce global warming gases, the construction Industry is endeavoring to diminish carbon dioxides emissions. Especially, by introducing the LCA methodology to the industry, A variety of related studies to measure the emission of carbon dioxides have been conducted. However, when the conventional LCA methodology is applied to the construction projects, some limitations have been reported. To overcome the restrictions derived from the industry characteristics, this research suggested the Activity-based LCA model by applying the Activity-based Costing (ABC), which breaks down the whole life cycles into more detailed stages. By implementing the newly developed model, forecasting accuracy of emission was elevated, and the critical control points on carbon dioxides were established. Through the case study of aluminium curtain-wall system, this research verified the usefulness of the Activity-based LCA.

Development of Design Collaboration Management System for Multiple Participants in Design Projects

Construction Projects have mutual collaborative structures among various participants for common objectives. Most of all the design project which is the initial phase in the project is crucial for determining project overall quality and requires intimate and continuous relations between project participants. Thus, this study suggests Design Collaboration Management System for successful performing projects through cooperation among participants in the initial stage of projects. First, expert interviews were performed to figure out present conditions of design collaboration management and problems. The factor analysis was applied to draw owner`s collaboration factors and engineer`s collaboration factors. Based on those factors, this study suggests design cooperation management process which gives a framework for systematic management method. Through the process the design collaboration management system was developed which helps owner/designers/engineer`s co-work. The System suggested from this study realizes systematic information management tool and through that it is expected to improve design product;`s quality, and further contribute the advancement of project.

Pre-Bid Clarification for Construction Project Risk Identification Using Unstructured Text Data Analysis

This paper analysed construction bidding information in order to define risk factors that can be appeared in the bid documents of construction projects. For this purpose, text analysis was conducted on biddersO inquiry information (Pre-bid RFI), which inquires uncertain information and omissions in the bid documents in order for pre-bid clarification. From the results of the analysis, what types of risk factors exist in the bid documents and what parts of the bid documents can be pre-reviewed to proactively respond to the uncertain ownerOs requirements. The results are expected to be used as important information for pre-bid clarification of bid documents. Moreover, this study can be meaningful in that it provides a comprehensive way to grasp a large amount of 1,054 documents without analysing the contents of individual documents directly through analysis of bidding information of construction projects using text mining.

Critical Factors Influencing on the Level of Service for Proactive Maintenance in Educational Facilities

Aging educational facility shall be managed and maintained through integrated service perspectives, in consideration of functions of each facility to provide safe and comfortable environment, rather than temporarily fixing/repairing problems. For doing this, it is a must to firstly understand the limitation of highly biased performance-based maintenance practice, which is a most common type applied at present, and therefore to establish maintenance system that reflects the functions and characteristics of maintenance service that a facility was designed with. Therefore, the objective of this study is to find items that have an influence on service level recognition in order to fairly evaluate service functions of educational facilities, and subsequently to use these factors as ingredients of establishing a consistent and efficient maintenance system. Therefore this study proposed explanatory variables to measure influential factors for each major maintenance category. Then appropriate statistical verification was carried out on questionnaires that collected from a number of industry experts to test its fe asibility.

Application of Serious Games for Effective Construction Safety Training

Construction safety training has mostly relied on one-way transference of instructors` knowledge to trainees through traditional media such as textbooks and lecture slides. However, safety knowledge could be more effectively acquired in experiential situations. The authors proposed a serious game to provide a comprehensive safety training environment. Trainees who assume the roles of safety inspectors in the game explore a virtual construction site to identify potential hazards and learn from the contents of feedback created by the game as a result of trainees` input. The paper reports details of the game design and development process. The test results indicated that trainees were motivated to refresh their safety knowledge, increased their learning interests, and enjoyed the learning process. In addition, trainees showed positive attitudes towards using the game scoring as a way of evaluating their safety knowledge. The test results encouraged the continuous development of the game.

Development of Management Systems based on IDEF3 Modeling to Improve Owner`s Competency of Implementing Green building Certification

Owners` efforts to acquire Green building certification, which started in 2002, have been rapidly increasing since 2006. The causes of the increased owners` interests are due to various incentives, legal obligation, and purpose of advertising. As project owners generally are deficient in capabilities and knowledge on how to deal with administrative works on certification, they tend to fulfill the minimum requirements for certification. However, effective administration process need capabilities of identifying individual making decision point and review information. The implementation of green building certification system is expected to provide comfort to both occupants and potential users. Furthermore it contributes to reducing energy costs throughout the phase of O&M. In addition, technology innovation in green industry can be obtained. Therefore, this study is intended to support owners in order that they can clarify certification tasks and make a rational decision-making in time. For this purpose, first of all, the major decision points were selected as the gateways of green building certification process. And then management system based on IDEF3 modeling was developed for supporting owners` decision-making performance. This management system will improve owners` overall capacity in handling all the tasks regarding the certification of Green building.