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Design changes by owners are common to many construction projects and can cause severe delays if owners do not consider that a change in one part of the project may cause a series of changes in other parts of that project. The impact of a changed component on other unchanged components is known as the 'change ripple effect'. To efficiently manage design changes, the ripple effect should be quantified and impact evaluated. This paper presents a building information modeling (BIM)-based quantification model to quantify the ripple effect of owner-requested design changes. The developed model calculates the impact of design changes and their ripple effect on a project's total duration. After analyzing the ripple effect over time, the model updates the project schedule accordingly. To demonstrate its usefulness and illustrate its essential features, the model is applied to a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian Society for Civil Engineering in its Vision 2020 statement identified sustainability in infrastructure as a core element for the civil engineering profession. However, what is sustainable infrastructure and more importantly, how can it be assessed? This paper uses stormwater infrastructure as its primary example to explore these issues, reviews issues with stormwater infrastructure in Canada, and critically examines current sustainability assessment methods. Two groups of problems are identified. The first group concerns issues related to economic, institutions, population growth, ecological, and health and safety. The second group examines the uncertainties in impact prediction associated with climate change effects as well as health impacts on the user. Sustainability evaluation methods (ranking, sustainability indicators, footprint, metabolism, extended metabolism, life cycle assessment), performance assessment tools, infrastructure report card, and the public infrastructure engineering vulnerability committee protocol for climate change assessment are then reviewed. Current methods of assessing infrastructure mostly focus on the functional aspects of the system with resource use reduction as the primary objective. However, they do not explicitly concentrate on resiliency and long-term sustainability, nor do they consider the associated health implications and change management capabilities for long-term sustainability. A new comprehensive framework would be required to assess broad, emerging issues related to infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change orders are ubiquitous in construction projects, and effective and efficient control of changes is critical to project success. There have been many empirical suggestions as to how to manage changes for best project outcomes, but this research is specifically aimed at exploring the relationship between project characteristics and the implementation of project change management best practices (PCMBP). Construction project data for this research are derived from the Construction Industry Institute (CII) benchmarking and metrics (BM&M) database. Binary logistic regressions and factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) are performed to find out the differences among diverse types of projects in terms of the extents to which the PCMBP elements have been implemented. The findings can assist construction industry practitioners with using PCMBP more purposefully in accordance with specific project characteristics so that they will be better able to develop and administer their project execution plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]