The business model of modular integrated construction (MiC) demands a unique design, engineering, supply chain, stakeholder composition, construction and management. These requirements engender man...

Critical risk factors in the application of modular integrated construction: a systematic review

Delay is one of the main challenges of construction projects, and there is still much to overcome in order to reach near zero delay in all construction projects. This project aims to conduct a systematic critical review including a bibliography analysis on delay literature in construction. The main questions consider what has been learnt from a decade investigating delay causes and effects in the construction literature and what factors have been missed in the literature. This paper also presents a new and challenging question regarding how digital tools and associated technologies may prevent any delay in construction projects, which can change the research direction from delay investigations to identifying prevention factors. The paper identifies the delay dataset, including 493 papers investigating delay in construction, and establishes a specific dataset of papers focusing on delay effects and causes (DEC), including 94 selected papers covering different factors examined in over 29 countries such as Iran, India, Turkey, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Cambodia, Oman, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, the US, the UK, and Egypt. In addition, the paper identifies 30 critical factors with the frequency of occurrences over three times in the DEC dataset and computes their medians of ranking. This paper also discusses digital tools and methods that can be used for delay analysis and preventions, including MS Project, Oracle Primavera P6, and Open Plan by Deltek. The paper discusses the project schedule delay analysis from project management methodology perspectives. It also discusses the current method’s limitations and future directions, which are based on the identification of the deficiency areas. In total, four overlooked factors are identified and suggested, including faulty data analysis, unmatched structure of the research questionnaires with new knowledge and standards [e.g., Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)], overlooked effects of digital technologies [e.g., Digital twin, Navisworks, Building Information Model (BIM), Geographic Information System (GIS), and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD)], and ignored job-site technologies. In addition, the paper presents the DEC model for future studies, including four main key factors. These factors are resources (e.g., project budgets, labour, material, equipment, and digital tool), project context, stakeholders performance (e.g., owner/client, consultant/designer, contractor, vendor/supplier), and external factors (e.g., ground condition, site location, regulation, natural disaster), which may significantly affect delay prevention and should be concurrently considered in the future delay investigations, since they may be required for designing an effective mitigation strategy when these proof points are identified. This would significantly help to utilise digital systems to prevent time overruns in different construction contexts.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-5309/9/9/191/pdf

Delay Causes and Emerging Digital Tools: A Novel Model of Delay Analysis, Including Integrated Project Delivery and PMBOK

This research aims to propose a comparative environmental analysis of conventional and prefabricated construction techniques utilizing a building information modelling (BIM) technique.,A set of indicators are selected to assess the environmental emissions throughout the construction life cycle, based on BIM platform. An existing project involving ten apartment buildings in Shanghai is selected as a case study.,The results reveal that prefabricated construction demonstrates environment-friendly performance with some exceptions of acidification and mineral resource consumption. Environmental impacts can also be further reduced by increasing the projected area ratio and percentage of project prefabrication.,Overall, the proposed method can be used to identify relevant environmental merits and for decision-making of appropriate construction techniques in building construction projects.

BIM-based life-cycle environmental assessment of prefabricated buildings

Managing stakeholder-associated risks and their interactions in the life cycle of prefabricated building projects: A social network analysis approach

In the era of sustainability as the development concept, prefabricated buildings have gradually become an important way to achieve sustainable development of the construction process due to the advantages of high construction speed, energy-saving, and environmental protection. In order to make the prefabricated building develop in a sustainable direction, it is necessary to understand the importance and performance of the critical sustainability aspects of the prefabricated building. However, the existing research has not fully explored this point, and classification research on all aspects of sustainability according to the management priorities of sustainable development is lacking. The present study determines the critical sustainability characterization items (criteria) of prefabricated buildings and uses the importance-performance analysis (IPA) method to explore the sustainability importance and performance level of prefabricated buildings in Guangzhou on the basis of the three dimensions of economic, social, and ecological sustainability. In particular, this study revises the traditional IPA method and uses the comprehensive weight obtained by the analytical network process- (ANP-) entropy weight method to obtain the importance of items. Results show that items “environmental protection” and “construction civilization” are of high importance and perform well. “Construction cost” and “product quality” are considered high-importance items with relatively poor performance; that is, these areas require urgent improvement actions. The “policy support” item at the intersection of IPA coordinates is also an aspect worthy of attention and discussion. This study provides a useful reference for decision-makers and relevant personnel on determining the priority of project management and achieving the optimal allocation of resources to promote the sustainable development of prefabricated buildings.

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Importance-Performance Analysis of Prefabricated Building Sustainability: A Case Study of Guangzhou

Prefabricated construction has been widely accepted as an alternative to conventional cast-in-situ construction, given its improved performance. However, prefabricated concrete building projects frequently encounter significant delays. It is, therefore, crucial to identify key factors affecting schedule and explore strategies to minimise the schedule delays for prefabricated concrete building projects. This paper adopts the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) model and analytic network process (ANP) method to quantify the cause-and-effect relationships and prioritise the key delay factors in terms of their importance in the Chinese construction industry. The DEMATEL model evaluates the extent to which each factor impacts other factors. The quantified extents are then converted into a prioritisation matrix through ANP. The delay factors of prefabricated construction projects are selected and categorised based on a literature review and an expert interview. Questionnaires are then implemented to collect the data. The results reveal that the issue of inefficient structural connections for prefabricated components is found to be the most significant factor and most easily affected by other delay factors. This research also suggests prioritising major delay factors, such as ‘lack of communication among participants’ and ‘low productivity’, in the Chinese construction industry during scheduling control. Overall, this research contributes an assessment framework for decision making in the scheduling management of prefabricated construction.

Assessing and Prioritising Delay Factors of Prefabricated Concrete Building Projects in China

An enormous amount of investment has been spent towards informatization for the construction industrialization engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) enterprises in China; however, the performance output remains uncertain. This paper aims to evaluate the informatization performance of the construction industrialization enterprises in China based on a proposed evaluation framework. The proposed framework entails a hierarchical input and output structure; the input metrics include 4 first-level and 17 second-level indicators, and the outputs include 6 first-level and 27 second-level indicators as the metrics, respectively. Survey and interview are utilized to collect data, with effective responses from thirty construction industrialization EPC enterprises. The informatization performance of these enterprises is evaluated using an improved D-FCA method, which incorporates the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), data envelopment analysis (DEA), and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation analysis (FCA). The research results indicate that all the surveyed enterprises meet the performance requirement, and 60% of the thirty enterprises show excellent performance, reaching A level, AA level, and AAA level. Furthermore, for those enterprises with DEA scores less than 1, which indicates inefficient use of the resources during the informatization process, strategies are proposed to improve the performance of these enterprises. This study contributes a comprehensive framework to evaluate the informatization performance of construction industrialization enterprises in China. The enterprises studied currently mainly come from some developed areas, and the overall situation for construction industrialization needs to be further studied in future research.

/pdf/evaluation-of-informatization-performance-of-construction-39stiyldlm.pdf

Yan Liu

Papers

Assessing and Prioritising Delay Factors of Prefabricated Concrete Building Projects in China

BIM-based life-cycle environmental assessment of prefabricated buildings

Evaluation of informatization performance of construction industrialization EPC enterprises in China